Hi,

I'm working on an employee survey. Since you folks have all kinds of survey data, I am hoping that it can be turned into evidence based and data driven guidance in designing the most effective survey possible

Can LimeSurvey share any data on other LimeSurvey surveys that have had excellent response rates?

Do other LimeSurvey users make their surveys available to use as a good example? Is there a place to see excellent surveys by other LimeSurvey users?

Does LimeSurvey provide any help or guidance on designing questions and/or surveys that are more likely to get a higher response rate (and thus qualify as excellent surveys)? Or does LimeSurvey share guidance on questions/surveys that get a lower response rate that should be avoided?

What conditions predict a higher response rate to a survey question on LimeSurvey? How can I use that information to design a better survey?

Any help would be warmly appreciated!

Thanks,

Russ Conte

Hi Russ,

that are quite a few questions... So there is a section at the website for downloading surveys shared by others: www.limesurvey.org/downloads/category/13-surveys But I am not sure if you will find something useful there. Maybe there is some more advice available at the forums.

At survey-consulting.com/survey-design-tips-tricks/ and survey-consulting.com/survey-design-tips-tricks-part-2/ there are some more hints about how to create "good" surveys.

Determining if a survey was successful based on the response rate can be tricky. Most surveys will differ a lot and thus that is not a reliable measure.
From our experience at > 1000 Limesurvey projects there are three things which are important:
1. Address your users carefully. You should outline what the survey is about, how long it will take and what the benefit of the survey is.
2. Keep your survey/questions simple. The shorter the texts, the better.
3. Only aks the really important questions. Of those, only mark some very few as mandatory.

That would be a first start for raising the response rate.

I agree with Mazi, it all comes down to quite a few points:
1. The profile of your target group (some people are more willing to respond than others)
2. The topic of your survey (people are dropping out less, if the topic is relevant for them personally)
3. Technical issues (survey needs to run quick and stable)
4. Question types (experience shows that there are question types where people drop out more, e.g. large matrix/array questions)
5. Length of the questionnaire (this one should be obvious, but as I see clients still requesting 45min online questionnaires it still seems to be relevant...)
etc, etc, etc.