5 Tips For Creating Effective Campaign Surveys

Politics lives and breathes on voter polls and surveys. For local candidates with limited budgets, there are online survey tools that can gather feedback in order to perfect a campaign’s message and methods. Campaign surveys can be sent to participants in several ways: through a website link, via your email list, or through off-line contact, such as an invitation through campaign brochures and pamphlets.

Online Candidate websites include a built-in poll feature, but for candidates that want to build out detailed surveys, there are a number of free and paid options out there. These include surveymonkey.com, freeonlinesurveys.com and zoomerang.com. A well-structured survey can provide a useful tool to provide insight into what issues are important to voters.

Below are some basic tips to help make your online survey effective and inviting to participants.

Determine your goals

When creating an online survey, define your objectives. What is it that you are trying to learn? What specific data will the survey yield that can help your political campaign? Don’t set up your survey to be all things to all issues. If you want to know what issues are important to your constituents, ask them. If you want to know the specifics of a particular issue, perhaps those questions should be asked in a separate survey.

Keep your survey short

If asking for general feedback, keep your survey short and to the point. Nobody likes getting suckered into a ‘short’ survey only to find after the first five questions they are only one tenth of the way through!

Keep the questions short and tight, so there is no ambiguity on the part of the reader. For example, don’t ask “What do you think of the commercial building moratorium?” Rather, make the question more specific, such as “Do you approve of the commercial building moratorium?”

For somewhat longer surveys or where you are looking for answers from only a particular subset of respondents, consider adding skip logic. This means that you can direct a respondent to a tailored set of questions and prevent readers from answering irrelevant questions. So if you ask on the first question, “Are you a homeowner?”, the answer provided may or may not lead to additional follow-up questions for that respondent.

Make it private

With any survey, it’s important for respondents to know how their replies are handled. Participation and honesty of answers generally increases if responses are completely anonymous. If you do collect personalized information, let the respondents know how their data will be kept and what privacy you provide.

Randomize answers

Some survey systems allow for answer choices to be randomized for each respondent. This method helps reduce bias. The answers also tend to become more statistically relevant. However, do not randomize answers for states or number ranges that are to be listed alphabetically or numerically.

Test, test, test!

Before launching your survey, be sure to thoroughly test. You may want to have a few outsiders take the survey and provide feedback on how clear the questions and answers were. One common problem is in answers where the participant is asked to choose more than one selection. If the answer structure is not set up right, such as using radio buttons rather than check boxes, then users will not be able to answer the questions properly. Be sure to check all permutations of the answers.

Numbers can be skewed

Online survey that are open to all visitors are prone to manipulation. Simply by deleting cookies, a user can answer the same survey over and over. Because of this, online surveys should not take the place of professional polling. It’s best not to publish the final results if you suspect that a poll has been manipulated. Unless you’re running a very simple survey, it’s probably a good idea not to allow results before the participant has taken the survey themselves.

Finally at the completion of a survey, always invite the participants to join your mail list or follow or fan you on Facebook or Twitter, so they can keep following your campaign.