Effective outreach is the backbone of a successful survey. Without an outreach strategy that catches the interest of your participants, your survey response rates may be low or biased towards only one type of respondent and you might not be able to get reliable information about your research questions. Even the best survey requires a good outreach plan to collect enough responses from the population you are hoping to reach.
Outreach plans can look very different depending on the needs and resources available for each different survey. Some types of surveys are more easily marketed whereas others require more complicated multi-pronged approaches. Is your survey a fun quiz about ice cream preferences or a lengthy health questionnaire? Either way it is possible to get high response rates but it is important to consider what type of outreach strategy your survey needs.
Let’s look at a couple tips for making sure that your survey reaches as many people as possible.
Prepare your Survey to Engage your Participants
While you prepare to share your survey with future participants, it is important to think about how your presentation might encourage or discourage people from participating. Here are a few quick strategies for making your survey user friendly and encouraging people to participate:
Choose a Good Outreach Plan and Format
No matter how well you have designed your survey, simply sending it to people is usually not enough to guarantee a response.
Think about your survey mode and the target population that you are trying to reach and ask yourself: What do they read online/in the news? Where do they go? Who do we know in common that could help with outreach? Answering these questions will help you select and format an outreach strategy. You can consider possible outreach methods such as flyers, postcards, emails, social media posts, newspaper announcements, word of mouth, and personal connection.
Write your Outreach Materials
The key to effective outreach is to think of it as the first step in building a relationship. The stronger the relationship between you and your participant, the more likely they will be to follow through in taking your survey and the more likely you are to get valuable, detailed responses from them.
Your outreach is the first chance you have to earn interest and establish rapport with your participants. Your primary focus should be on creating a tone that is engaging.
For Example…
Consider each of the following examples of survey outreach plans:
- You are asked to take a survey on the spot from someone that you do not know in front of the grocery store. They tell you that you will be entered into a raffle if you participate. (Be sure to check if raffles are permitted in your state!)
- Your friend forwards you an energetic email asking for your participation in a survey.
- You come across a survey link on your social media feed.
- Your roommate asks you to participate in a survey for their intro psychology class.
- You notice a survey code on the bottom of a store receipt. The receipt says that anyone who enters will receive a discount on their next purchase at that store.
Each of these surveys has a different outreach strategy because they target different populations and have different resources at hand. You can see how factors such as tone, methods, and incentives have changed how these various researchers advertise their survey.
Personal Project
Think about how you can best reach and appeal to your target population based on these tips and formulate an outreach strategy. Start by making sure your survey is designed to make people feel more willing and encouraged to complete it. Once you have a compelling survey you can focus on the best way to reach your target population.
The next section will talk more about what it means to get high or low response rates and how to know when you can start to conduct your analysis.
