Creating an online survey might sound like a simple endeavor – you just come up with questions, input them, and hit send, right? But building a successful survey that attracts respondents, engages them, and provides rich data and insights requires a lot of time, thought, and planning. Here are seven tips for what to consider when you’re putting together your next survey: 1. Plan your survey comprehensively When coming up with your survey, it can be easy to focus on the content of the questions and the types of responses you hope to receive. But thinking ahead and considering how you’ll analyze the survey data can help you craft questions, tweak response options and formats, and ensure your survey is as efficient and successful as possible. By planning your analysis and keeping in mind the type of data you’d like to have at the end of your survey– be it summary tables, visualizations, or statistical tests – you can optimize your questionnaire in small ways that can have a big impact on your results. Good to know: With LimeSurvey it's easy to export your survey responses as different data formats, including Excel as well as dedicated survey software like R or SPSS Statistics. 2. Respect privacy and data protection Ensuring your survey is compliant with data protection laws like GDPR and guaranteeing privacy can help assuage respondents’ concerns about how their responses will be used. This assurance can also go a long way in encouraging them to provide their honest thoughts and true point of view. Good to know: Relevant privacy features like anonymous responses or encryption and data protection come out of the box with LimeSurvey Cloud and can be configured according to your needs. 3. Know your target audience Whether you’re launching an employee satisfaction survey for your direct team or a customer satisfaction survey for hundreds of thousands of active customers, it’s important to know precisely who your target audience is. If you’re only seeking feedback from a small number of people, this is usually a simple task, but if you’re dealing with a large number of possible respondents, one best practice is to draw a sample of the relevant audience you’d like to hear back from, and invite those people. If you are conducting an exploratory study and do not have a list of all possible respondents available, considering how to target relevant respondents is critical. If you need results that are representative of the general population, it’s best to avoid river sampling, or recruiting survey participants while they are carrying out another online activity. Depending on your field of research, partnering with a panel provider who can help you reach relevant respondents might be the best way forward, Good to know: LimeSurvey offers panel integration that makes it easy to include respondents from professional panel providers. 4. Tailor your questionnaire to participants One great thing about online questionnaires is that you can create an individual survey experience for every participant, when needed. With information you’ve already gathered about each respondent and/or their previous answers, you can use LimeSurvey’s integrated condition designer and expression manager to filter pages, questions, and response options, as well as create individual texts and provide direct feedback. This is especially useful if participants are completing an assessment or providing constructive criticism of a course, experience, or service. With these features, your questionnaire becomes not just another boring survey, but an immersive experience that motivates respondents to provide accurate responses. 5. Monitor survey responses While it might seem prudent to wait to look at your survey responses until it has closed, it can be beneficial to keep an eye on responses while the survey is ongoing. By checking data during field time, you’ll know early if there are any problems with the questionnaire and whether or not you need to follow-up with respondents, reminding them to take the survey. Good to know: LimeSurvey offers users direct access to their survey responses, so you can keep an eye on your data without having to export it. 6. Implement measures to obtain high data quality Before beginning your data analysis, it’s important that you check the quality of the data. This helps exclude incomplete or duplicate surveys as well as surveys containing implausible or quick responses, so that your results are not skewed by errors. To help identify participants who are not taking your questionnaire seriously, you can include special questions that can help you pinpoint a respondent’s motivation, or use LimeSurvey’s quote feature, which excludes participants who fail your quality test. 7. Work to achieve high response rates Though you may not receive a 100% participation rate for your questionnaire, there are ways to motivate people to participate. Chief among them is making sure that you give people enough time to respond. If your field time is too short, that will have a significant impact on participation and data, and can result in a biased sample composition. Another great way to encourage participation is to follow-up with them – with LimeSurvey’s closed-access surveys, you can send reminders to people who have not started your survey, as well as those who have started but have yet to finish. Good to know: LimeSurvey offers the option to save and resume a questionnaire for both closed-access and open-access surveys. By keeping these seven pointers in mind while planning your survey, you can ensure your timelines are sound, optimize your questionnaire, and set yourself up for success. With LimeSurvey, you can create and customize surveys that suit your needs. For more information on getting started or using our vast array of tools, check out our robust Help Center.

By choosing LimeSurvey, you can either choose one of our many ready-to-use yet customizable survey templates, or build your own survey from scratch. No matter which option is best for you, here are the steps you need to get started. Create Question Groups After choosing your template and launching your bespoke survey, the first step is to create question groups. These groups keep questions of a similar nature or theme together, and if you have multiple groups, the feature displays all questions within each group together by default. After naming your groups, you can enter a description for each group that will be shown to survey participants, explaining the questions in that group, set questions to appear in a random order, and set relevance equations that make it simple to repeat a set of questions several times. For example, if a family includes two students at your school and you need the parents to answer the same questions about each student, you can create a relevance equation that ensures the questions are asked based on the number of students indicated earlier in the survey. Add Questions Once you’ve created your question groups, it’s time to add in your questions! Using either the Survey Structure or Add Questions features, you can create new questions and use the Questions Editor to choose the type of question you’d like to include. After you’ve assigned the question to a question group and indicated whether the question is mandatory, save your settings and add more! Activate your survey After adding your questions to your question groups, you’re nearly ready to activate your survey. To do this, select the settings tab, click overview, and choose “Activate this survey.” You’ll have the opportunity to choose your general survey settings –once that’s done, click save and active survey! From there, you can choose whether your survey is open-access, which allows everyone with the survey link to take it, or closed-access, which requires a unique survey invite for participation. When it’s time for you to end your survey, simply select “Stop this survey,” and then confirm the choice by clicking “Deactivate survey.” Distribute Your Survey If you’ve chosen an open-access survey, you can share the survey URL by visiting the Overview page of your survey under the settings tab, choose the share survey section and you will find the link of your survey. You can also click the open sharing panel button. You will find ways your survey via QR code or social channels. If you’ve chosen a closed-access survey, you can activate the survey participants table. This table enables you to invite participants, keep track of who has completed the survey, and ensure each person participates only one time. To create the table, navigate to settings, choose survey menu, click survey participants, and then click initialize participant table. Use the survey participants table to generate unique codes for each participant. Once you’ve created your participant table, you can import participant data, and then use the table to manage survey participants and track participation status. Collect Responses When it’s time for you to collect survey responses, you can choose whether or not the responses are anonymous. The default option is not to make the responses anonymous, which means they are matched with the information from your survey participant table. If you choose to make responses anonymous, there is no way to connect answers and participants – but you will always be able to view individual responses entered by survey participants. To monitor responses in real-time, click the responses table from the top toolbar, choose responses & statistics, and then click “Display responses” from the top toolbar of the response summary page. From there, you can use an array of filters to choose how to display the responses. To ensure the integrity and quality of your survey data, use the check data integrity function to vet consistency and determine redundancy. This function looks for possible errors that might exist between the response tables and survey tables, or between the token list and the central participant database. Analyze Results Once all responses are in and your survey has closed, it’s time to dig in and analyze the results. With LimeSurvey’s analysis tools, you can create simple and complex statistics using the response table and field summary, filter the data as needed, and generate graphs and charts. To access these tools, click "Responses & statistics," then choose the function that you want to use. For additional external analysis, you can export your survey data in a variety of formats that are compatible with tools such as SPSS, R, STATA, and more. To export survey data, find “Responses” from the top toolbar, select “Responses & statistics,” click “Export,” and then select your desired export format. To save any graphs and charts that you’ve generated using LimeSurvey’s tools, use the “Export images” function and choose your desired format. With LimeSurvey, you can quickly and easily create and customize surveys that suit your needs. For more information on getting started or using our vast array of tools, check out our robust Help Center or start your own survey now.

Provide clear and honest survey information Everyone has opened a survey thinking they’d give some quick feedback, only to find that there are far more questions than anticipated and it will require more time than they were expecting. To avoid this, ensure that you’re open and transparent about the details of your survey. Before respondents begin, give them information about the survey topic, the number of questions, and an indication of how much time this will take. Additionally, it can be helpful to include details about data protection, including how the data is stored and whether participants can revoke permission. This can give people peace of mind, allowing them to fully understand how their responses and data will be used. Show survey relevance Gathering survey feedback hinges on ensuring your survey is relevant to your target audience. It is critical that you explain the topic and lay out how this is relevant to your survey respondents’ interests, be it determining the cause for a charity golf tournament, furthering academic research, or weighing in on workplace culture. Explaining why participation is important can also help convince people to take your survey. When they fully understand the purpose of the survey and how it relates to them, they’ll be more inclined to respond. Use mandatory questions only where needed It can be appealing to make every survey question mandatory – after all, you worked hard on putting the survey together and every question matters to you! But, for many respondents, too many mandatory questions can create fatigue, resulting in a higher breakoff rate. To avoid this, determine which questions are the most important to receive answers to, and make those mandatory, but leave the rest as optional. You might be surprised by how many people go ahead and respond to the optional questions! Test your survey to minimize breakoff Before pushing your survey live, it can be beneficial to receive feedback on your overall survey design through pre-testing. Send your survey questions to friends and colleagues to gain insights into the clarity of the questions, the survey flow, and whether the types of questions you’ve chosen (multiple choice, short answer, ranking, etc.) are the best option. After you’ve fine-tuned your content, don’t forget to check how your survey appears on different devices, such as laptop, smartphones, and tablets, and how quickly it loads when connected to different types of internet connections. If there are any issues with appearance or connection, be sure to address them before sending the survey to participants. Make surveys accessible During the testing phase, don’t forget to optimize your survey for a multitude of devices, including screen readers, which are often used by people who are blind or visually impaired. Make sure you’re using user-friendly fonts, readable font sizes, and high contrast to help further avoid eye strain or fatigue, especially if your survey is long or requires the participant to provide answers to open-ended questions. Give people plenty of time to respond One critical component of gathering survey feedback is patience. Though instant gratification is hard to resist, ensuring participants have enough time to respond is imperative for receiving useful data, opinions, and information. When planning your survey timelines, ensure you’ve provided enough time for everyone to respond so that you can have a robust, diverse sample of answers, thoughts, and perspectives. Offer incentives for participation Never underestimate the power of an incentive. If you offer your target participants a small token of appreciation for the time they spend filling out your survey, it may entice more of them to complete the survey. Though unconditional incentives work best, you can also consider a lottery for respondents, a donation to a charity for each completed survey, perks for employees, or extra credit for students. Send reminders Everyone is busy these days, so don’t hesitate to remind people about your survey after you’ve sent out the initial links or invitations. If you’re conducting a closed-access survey, use the LimeSurvey feature to send reminders to both those who have yet to start a survey, as well as those who started, but did not finish. A little nudge might just be the thing they need to jump in! Using these tips and tricks, you should be able to acquire the feedback, data, and opinions you need to make your survey a success. To learn more about how to use LimeSurvey’s features, like sending reminders to participants, check out the Help Centre. Haven’t tried LimeSurvey yet? Start your own free survey now!