Wake the Monster! Or: How to Start a Survey
Finding the right goal and questions for a survey can be very annoying. I messed that up once. But I tried again and now got a plan on how to prepare for a survey.
Getting started with a survey seems so easy: Find some questions and go for it. I thought so too and did just that. As a result, we got stuck in weeks of discussions and reversions. We woke a huge monster. I told myself: Never ever again.
Sorry, wrong answer. The next survey was just waiting.
The good news is: This time, I got myself a strategy for starting the survey.
Master Thesis for Timeular
To give you some background: Benjamin Barteder and I currently work on our master thesis about Timeular, a start-up company that built a tool for time tracking. Our approach for the thesis is
- Find out about the business requirements.
- Find out about the user needs.
- Bring both of them together.
- Set a goal.
- Find a way to reach that goal (and that is what Content Strategy is all about).
I focus on the user needs and as there where no quantifiable data in the company I decided to a survey (yeah, it is my own fault, I know).
To begin with, I thought about all the mistakes that happened during our last survey
- No goals.
- No plan.
- No data or other basis for the questions.
#First: Create a basis for your questions
As I was not quite sure about the survey goal yet, I started with some data work. I found a tool presented by Meghan Casey in her book “The Content Strategy Toolkit” very useful. It is called „Discovery Insights Workbook“ and it basically helps you to go through all your data, collect insights and ask questions based on the insights. You can use every piece of data you got like user testings, website analytics reports, social analytics reports, strategy papers, stakeholder interviews … I was in the fortunate situation of having the Benni’s feasibility study on Timeular to start with. He already did some user testing, an audit and many interviews with the stakeholders.
#Second: Set a goal (and stick to it)
It took me quite a while to do that research, but it really helped. When looking at my questions I saw a direction for the survey and Benni and I could define a goal. We decided to:
Compare users and potential users in terms of information needs and behaviours, like content, channels, sharing behaviour and topics (especially concerning the topic of productivity).
Don’t forget to present the goal to your stakeholders and get their ok! It will help you to define your questions later.
#Third: Prioritise questions
Having the goal in mind, it didn’t take us very long to prioritise the questions in our excel sheet. Only those with priority 1 found their way into the survey.
#Fourth: Find questions (and answer options)
Only then did I start to write the actual questions. And matching answer options. I took the questions form our excel sheet as a starting point but also did some research on surveys to make sure that they are scientifically sustained.
#Fifth: Present the survey to your stakeholders
In our case, the stakeholders were the team of Timeular and our supervisors. That is not much, but still there were some discussions around questions and their arrangement.
#Sixth and last: Test it over and over again
Okay, that one sounds like a mum-said-do-not-forget-your-raincoat-advise. Nevertheless, I still found mistakes during the last time, I tested the survey. Mostly, as there are some differing paths that had to work.
Now our survey is out there in the world! I am really exited, as our master thesis journey just started. You’ll definately hear from us again about that ;)
PS: If you are interested in time tracking and productivity, content strategy or timeular in particular, we’d be delighted if you got 5 minutes to take part in our survey :)
