One of the common mistakes that people make when conducting surveys is forgetting that people are giving up their time to answer your questions.  Even if you are paying them an incentive to compensate in some small way for their time, the reality is that they are still giving up their time for you and what you want to know from them.

Their responses are often invaluable, but only if they actually respond!

You see, it is easy to think of the people answering your survey as merely ‘respondents’.  When this happens, chances are that the survey being created for ‘respondents’ is going to be all about you and the questions you want to ask.  It is easy to expect that respondents will simply answer any and all questions you send their way.  Afterall, the job of a respondent is to respond, right? 

But this is not really how it works.

The people you want answers from are constantly being offered plenty of other things to occupy their time and attention, and if a survey hasn’t been developed with this in mind, you are highly likely to lose them during the survey, or not even have them start the survey.

There is nothing more deflating than creating a survey and putting it out there to the world, and nobody responds.

Think of respondents as ‘customers’ of your survey

This probably sounds like a simple idea, and it is.  Instead using the term ‘respondents’, think of these people as customers.  Like any customer, you want to delight them, take care of them, and make it all about them.  Simply by doing this, you start to reduce the chances that you will create a survey that nobody wants to respond to.

With this as the starting point, you are in a better position to collect better information and be able to make better decisions.