In the first two installments of this 5-part series, I focused on the necessary process of planning your survey, which includes an honest consideration of whether you even need a survey at all and a specific linkage of your survey to your strategic planning documents. Once you have done this due diligence and are confident that the time required from you and your stakeholders is worth the potential insights you glean, you are ready to create the actual items.

Since people create surveys about any and every topic, offering generalizable advice about survey building is difficult. I’m going to do my best here to cover some broad topics, though, that should help get you started.

Stick to the Plan

In the Practitioner’s Corner of my last post, I showed you a simple way to map your items to your strategic plan. You can begin this process with filler text like “A question about frequency of communication” so that when you get to this point (the topic of this article), you can begin to turn those ideas into actual survey items. The key part is to keep your survey items confined to the topics you planned for originally. If you want to ask about something that’s not on the blueprint, you either need to drop the question or update your blueprint. Again, the point of this exercise is to make sure you are intentional about only asking stakeholders to give you their time when you can justify why you are asking for it.

Fish with Lures, Not Nets

I rarely use a sports or outdoors analogy, but I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, so I hope you’ll indulge me this time.

When you need to catch a lot of shrimp quickly, you can go out on a boat and drag the water with a net. You can do the same thing for fish. Although this beats catching fish one at a time, you’re far more likely to end up with trash as part of your haul than if you used a lure and a fishing pole. Lures are often designed to attract a specific species of fish. It’s slower than a net, sure, but if you have your heart set on eating sea bass for dinner, a net full of carp and rusty paint buckets isn’t going to help you very much.

Crafting a survey should be like fishing with a lure. You should avoid writing multiple items to collect “just in case” data or information that you think you’re “supposed to” collect. You shouldn’t have to guess what items you need and data to collect. It should all map clearly to your blueprint.

As an example, if you want to know how much time your stakeholders have to volunteer during the school day, don’t ask the respondent to tell you whether they work full time or part time and then target those who said “Part Time.” If you want to know who to ask for support during the school day, then ask them something like “How many days per month are you available to volunteer during the school day.” Of course, you can make the questioning more sophisticated by using survey logic tools, but the main idea is to make sure you are asking for the actual information you are trying to obtain.

Determining Survey Length

I hope by this point (Part 3 of the series) I’ve made it pretty clear that you should know what you’re going to ask about before you start writing any questions. Deciding how many questions you need is a little more complicated. In general, you should follow a “less is more” approach. Remember that you are asking the participant to give up their time to take this survey. The more questions the respondent has to answer, the more likely they are to develop survey fatigue. Once that happens, you really can’t trust the data that you are getting from them. So, refer back to the larger questions you need to answer, then try to identify the fewest number of survey items that you think can give you the information you need to answer those questions. Don’t fall victim to the “If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” mindset of asking everything you can think of to make sure you have your bases covered. Be intentional. Less is more.