Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I think your story on why a person needs to take the survey needs to be a bit more compelling. Furthir, I would increase the visibility of the button on the eneregy bill overview..... I had to look for it.

On a seperated note, a couple of the questions appeared to be written in a biased manner. I wonder if you loose readers when they come to these.

Frank Hurtte

Hi Catherine,

I agree with Frank and NuCoPro. Demos should be at the end of the survey, where you ask if people want to continue to hear from you.

Importantly, your positioning of the survey initiative needs fleshing out. We don't know how the data will be used, and there is no guarantee of anonymity/confidentiality for respondents. A couple of sentences addressing this may put potential respondents' minds at ease.

I haven't thoroughly researched your business, but the background information and the survey itself appears quite biased to the positive. For example, when I linked through to read the abstract of the energy bill, it was written with a very positive "spin."

If you plan to use your research data in marcoms supporting a particular view, be careful about how you present the subject matter and word the questions/response options. Opponents could refute the data on bias terms alone.

*IF you really want to test your statements about perceived benefits and threats from the bill, have respondents rate them on a 5-point agreement scale. If you get a large number of "neutrals," that's telling you that either people don't know enough about the topic to have an opinion or you haven't tested what resonates with the target respondent.

For time purposes as well, a simple, bullet-pointed "just the facts" description of the bill's key points should suffice. People may not be responding at the rates you want because they need to read too much to get up to speed for answering questions. (Some may drop off when they start reading and perceive an agenda on your company's part in interpreting the bill.)

Some notes on survey design:
1. Particularly since you are asking respondents to evaluate results of the bill, you need a way for them to easily toggle back and forth between the bulleted bill description and survey questions. To do that now requires exiting the survey and re-entering from the beginning. *If you track data on drop-offs, look at where they're leaving.

2. Question 4 - It appears that each of your response options are included in the bill description, so you should also include a button for "all." In addition, the "other" should have its own button.

If your goal is to analyze relative recognition of each benefit, either make the question a "choose all that apply" or ask people to first select the #1 benefit they perceive and then the #2 one (adds an extra question, but better for analysis purposes).

2. Question 6 - I would recommend making this an open-ended question and coding the responses into thematic buckets. The impacts of the bill across business types and sizes may be too varied to fit within the constraints of your response options.

If your goal is to get a read on overall sentiment for "positive" versus "negative," then offer four response options: negative, neutral, positive, don't know.

3. Question 8 - It may be better to ask a question with a scale of 1-5, where 1= Very negative and 5= Very positive. Then, you can have a follow-up open-ended question asking for detail. The lengthy list of positive statements followed by negatives presents a bias. It's also biased in the sense of putting words into respondents' mouths (and forcing a choice between your options versus what they may really feel).

Overall, it's a brief survey (good!) and a decent incentive (also good). However, at this point, it looks more like a marcoms-fueling and lead generation vehicle than objective research.

Hope this helps.

A couple observations:
- the black line at the top doesn't indicate with text that you are 20% "done with the survey". It just sits there and says 20%. I thought my machine hung and was waiting for the rest of the bar to load.

- When asked to check what industry I was in, the program wouldn't let me go forward until I had actually checked every single job/industry/etc.

- I too felt that a couple of the questions were a little biased in phrasing.

I would suggest a final open box to type in comments in general at the end - if you are interested in knowing what a cross-section of the people really feel.

It was a interesting survey to take and I liked the fact you provided the resource to read to gain the facts needed to answer the questions.

-On the Opera browser the banner interfers with the flash survey. I am assuming they are both flash items.

-Q4 has bias answers - what about if someone opposes energy -- the comments section is not an option

-Q5 same as Q4

-Q6 same as Q5 and Q4

-Q7 gives the option for yes and no and then more options -- that is an unusual answer scale

-Q9 gives the option for other 4,5,6 should do the same

-Ahh did this on Survey Monkey -- very good!

Getting me interested in the survey:
After reading through your website, I still don't know why your organization cares about the legislation. Is it simply curiosity or is there a business connection to it?

The summary of the legislation was hard to read (the type is small and I wasn't sure if an independent authority wrote it or you wrote it). I would've preferred to see bullet points with simple statistics.

Filling out the survey:
There were 3 types of questions that you asked: my general opinion on the legislation, how it will effect my business, and who I am.

If I don't have an opinion on specific points of the legislation, I want to be able to say "don't know". Likewise, the impact of the legislation may take a while to "sink in" to businesses. 2020 is far away for almost all businesses (except those that are working to implement these new technologies). Lastly, I don't want to give you all of my contact information at all (required to complete the survey) unless I want to do business with you. A simple email address should be sufficient to enter the contest.

Does your newsletter go out to your customers and list subscribers? If so they are people who represent corporations, governments, etc., who are your clients?

1. This is clearly not a random sample but just a take on your subscribers and website visitors opinion. What will you use the collected data for other than to get a feel for what some of your customers think? What are your goals for using this survey?

2. Is a drawing for a gas card that compelling, especially if your list consists of very busy business people and so on.

3. Can the survey be much shorter, perhaps all on one page? That may not be possible but worth considering.

4. I personally do not like the link to the survey with the red with white text. This is merely my personal opinion but I prefer the traditional blue hyperlink color.

I think you can improve the number of people who take your survey by making these changes to the landing page:

Instead of 'need your perspective', put the offer up top. "Complete our survey and you could win at $250 gas card".

Two paragraph is too long - condense and streamline.
Increase the font size on the paragraph 1 pt - too small.