You may want some or all informants to complete your survey on the web.
We can implement your web based surveys and ensure that only authorised informants can participate while still assuring informants of their confidentiality. Each informant gets an email invitation to participate, including a link which contains a unique key to get into the online survey but neither you nor we are able to relate survey responses to individual informants.
Click here to visit a Quantify sample survey on the web.
When they are ready to complete the web based surveys, informants click the link in their email invitation. The web based surveys open with your logo on the welcome page then presents the survey items for them to complete by clicking their responses or typing if you have asked for text responses. When we are ready, we retrieve the data directly from the server and load it into our analysis software along with any data we have keyed from paper questionnaires.
The web based surveys system eliminates the need to print all those paper questionnaires and reduces the data keying workload so it is modern, quick and green. There are costs associated with a web survey so although you save on postage and the data keying we don't have to do, the extra set up work together with the web hosting cost mean that for smaller surveys this option is more expensive than paper and pencil.
Offer both routes and secure respondent commitment in advance
There are still many organisations in which some employees and / or customers don't have access to a connected PC with a browser and feel comfortable using it. So web based surveys may be the best route for many of the informants for your survey but it may not be suitable for all of them. Some of the targets for your survey might suspect that their responses won't be as anonymous in an online survey as they would be on paper. So why not let people choose which way they prefer to participate in the survey?
Step 1
You provide us with a list of all the participants with name, address and email address, if they have one. We send an advance notice to every member of the target group to say that the survey will be happening. This message includes explanation of the reasons for conducting the survey, commitment to take action on the results and assurances of anonymity and confidentiality. Crucially, though, it also asks each participant to choose whether they wish to complete the survey on paper, or on the web. They can respond by using a tear-off strip, or by sending email directly to us.
This process has the usual positive effect on response rate which any advance publicity will achieve, but this is heightened by the commitment people make by choosing to participate by one route or another.
We use the participant list you provided to create a preference register, in which each person is allocated as a paper or a web participant. People who don't respond to the initial request are allocated to one route or another using a rule we will agree with you. This could be "Paper unless they opt for the web", or "Web if we have an email address on file, paper if not" or any other rule you decide is appropriate.
Step 2
We generate invitations to participate, as follows:-
| Paper Survey | Web Based Surveys |
| A personalised covering letter, with the printed
questionnaire and a QUANTIFY business
reply envelope.
We can mail these direct, or deliver them to you for distribution. |
A personalised email invitation to participate,
including a link to the survey web site, with a unique respondent
key for this participant.
We send these directly to participants. |
Step 3
Responses return to us by post or accumulate on the web site, and we send you daily progress reports showing responses received so far.
Step 4
We issue a reminder. For paper participants it may be just a circular, or in the case of an employee survey, asking managers to remind all their people. For web participants, we send an email reminder to everyone, (unless you have specially asked us to implement response tracking, we don't know who has and who hasn't responded) with their unique access link repeated. If they have already completed the survey but they try again, they just get a message saying "This respondent key has already been used."
Step 5
When you agree with us that the survey should close, we download the response data from the web, combine it with the keyed data from the paper participants, and proceed with analysis and reporting in the usual way.
