Survey Your Audience to Increase Engagement

Author: Peter Shafer

Surveying your audience is a great way to learn more about them and inform your marketing decisions. You can learn more about what your donors really care about, how they think you’re doing, and what would help them be more engaged. You can learn more about your community on the services you’re providing and what is making the biggest impact. Peter Shafer is here to help you craft that perfect survey so you can take in the information and make choices from the perspective of those you serve and get it out of your own head.

What you’ll learn:

→ sample questions you’ll want to include.
→ how to go into the survey with the right mindset.
→ unique ways to get people to fill out your survey.

Key Takeaways

[10:13] Be Outcome Driven Each poll should be about a specific topic. Having too many questions or topics can deter your audience from completing the survey. Use “I” statements as questions so the audience feels more connected to the survey.
[17:04] Reverse Engineering Doing a general poll every year may not provide valuable information that you can use. Think about what results you want to get from polling your audience and build your survey from there. You can poll a smaller, more direct, group of people and compare that data to the larger audience to find anomalies in your data.
[26:53] Scale Questions Using questions with a 1-5, or 10, scale is the easiest and fastest way for your audience to complete the survey and allows you to ask more questions. Limit the survey to 1 to 3 open-ended questions at the end to avoid longer completion times.
[32:05] Incentivization Rather than offering an individual incentive to every participant, offer a raffle or sweepstakes prize to one winner at the end. Find a sponsor that will make a donation for every completed survey so the participant feels that they are making a donation.

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