1. Clearly define the purpose of your survey.
First rule of order is to know what it is you are trying to discover before you build your survey. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to know or communicate in your survey, then it is impossible for you to get the results you want. After all, you don’t get what you don’t ask for, and you can’t give what you don’t have. The more clear your purpose, the better.
2. Keep the survey short and focused.
Five minutes, they said. Won’t take long at all, they said. We all know that there are very few things more irritating than excessively long surveys that we don’t have time for. Don’t perpetuate this evil. Surveys should take LITERALLY 2-5 minutes. If you can’t get the information you want in that time, the data you’re trying to collect is too complicated, and you aren’t going to be winning any favors with the voters you are contacting.
Use a series of simple questions to arrive at the destination you want to. Complex and long winded questions can be confusing to the respondent. With so little commitment for the respondent to finish, you want to make filling out your survey as simple, and enjoyable, an experience as it can be.
4. Use closed-ended questions whenever possible.
Closed-ended questions help to simplify things for your respondents. Having closed-ended questions force the answers to be concise and direct. While they may seem to cause issues to be oversimplified for the respondent, it makes their answering process easier, and quicker, also allowing for conveniently quantifiable data afterwards.
As the famous proverb says, “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask the fish.” It is always a good idea to run your survey by several uninvolved respondents before full use. You can’t assume that the respondents will have any idea where you or this survey is coming from. It has to be understandable to someone who has never given a first thought to the issues it is dealing with. On the flip side, you are so immersed in your topic that you don’t even realize that some things are just not common knowledge. A little outside perspective can do wonders.