What are tips for designing a survey?

What are tips for designing a survey?

William A. Cohen (Author & Founder, Institute of Leader Arts) gives expert video advice on: What are the steps involved in market research?; What are tips for designing a survey? and more...

The difficult questions go to the rear, your easier questions up front, so you can get people talking. There's a cautionary note. When you're breaking down numbers, don't make them ambiguous, so that you have, let's say, 1 through 10 and 10 through 20. You just said 10 twice. Where do they put it? Do they put it in 1 through 10 or 10 through 20? So it goes 1 through 9, 10 through 19, and so forth like that. The best suggestion I have, though, on that, is either, if there are many books, you can go to the library and they'll show you how to do these surveys. That's one easy one. Another is over the Internet. My book of course covers it. No matter what it is, you want to keep the survey short, understanding that people are doing you a great favor in doing this thing, even if you offer an incentive of some sort. So you want to make sure that it's easy to do. The other thing that a lot of folks do which is a good idea is to do a small test first, and see what didn't go right or the way you thought. Then you can make these changes as you roll out the entire test.