Surveys are hard, and dare I say old school. Everywhere I turn, I see community surveys being created but no one actually filling them in.
Often, I feel like when we need to know something about the community our automatic response is to create a survey. It feels efficient! We can reach lots of people at once! We can analyse the data, figure out the problems and solutions to all the things!
There are a few problems with surveys:
no one really wants to fill them in
it's a waste of people's time
there is usually no reward
they actually take quite a bit of effort to create, promote and make sense of
we often take the responses all too seriously, especially when diverse voices are excluded
we forget that people often 'unintentionally lie' about their needs (ala 'mom test')
it feels very transactional
What can you do instead of surveys?
There are many different ways to be curious and find answers to the questions you may have, here are a few ideas to get going:
create a poll: this could be an official poll like Twitter and LinkedIn offer, you can also DIY it by asking people to emoji react
ask questions: why not take the questions you'd like to ask in a survey and put them out in various locations? This could be within your community, on social or in other people's communities.
DM people: but avoid overusing mass DMs, people smell them a mile away and quickly start to ignore them.
open your doors to conversations: invite people, create a culture of open doors, use email as an invitation, make a habit of sharing a 'Calendly link'
Approach all of this with curiosity and pull the data together bit by bit. Take notes and gather the data points. It can get even more interesting when responses spark other responses. Sometimes people don’t know what to say until they see what other people respond with.
Perhaps the most valuable and exciting part of this is that usually there are options to dive deeper. This is where the value is.
You can ask things like:
what did you mean by that?
can you give me an example of that?
who did you do that with?
how did that help you?
why is that important?
Personally, I love surveys that have a valuable output at the end. An industry salary database or industry reports, for example.
Of course, not all surveys are bad. Recent ones that I’ve seen work well are literally one-question surveys via a DM. Anonymous surveys are great too.
I’m not saying no-to-surveys, it’s more about re-thinking about how to be creative to get the insights you are after.
We talk about this stuff in the social sciences all the time. This is excellently put in plain English without the jargon. Hats off.