Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

It sounds like your problem isn't one of technology (are people having problems trying to access/complete the form) but one of benefit (why should someone spend their time completing your survey?). If people aren't completing the survey, perhaps it's too long/tedious. Or, perhaps the form's purpose/intention isn't shared up-front with volunteers. Or perhaps you're asking too many personal questions. If there isn't a strong reason to complete the survey, perhaps you need to incentivize - a valuable prize for participating, for example.

My suggestion is not to use surveys at all. They are ineffective, grab only those who are interested enough to plough through them - and yield poor results.

So get clever. You are an aspiring PhD - so get clever, imaginative and above all, have some fun: use the Google Display Network. You can fine tune it to a degree that will give you demographics to your hearts' content. What's more in doing so you will be learning something that few marketers have any real grasp of, let alone understand how to control the immense power of.

For a small outlay you will have results by the end of the week - if not the afternoon. The things you will learn will be well worth 100x the costs involved.

I also answered this recent question: https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstid=40919 that also covers this very problem.

PS Paying people to do a survey immediately skews the results. The Display Network is both powerful, subtle and above all, accurate. Ask the proper questions and you will get some stunning results.

Is the problem that you can't get people to even look at the survey, or are they looking at it and deciding they don't want to invest the time, effort and energy to complete it?

The survey does look very foreboding -- long, complicated, uninteresting -- but that may be a secondary problem. How do you generate interest/awareness? If you're not recruiting respondents then it doesn't matter. So let's be sure we're solving the right problem.

You need to get people to the survey; then you need to make the survey seem easy/interesting; and then you need to make sure people are motivated to spend time on your project. If you miss any one of the three factors, you won't have a large enough base for legitimate research.

Have you consulted with a market research expert on this, or are you trying to be your own expert?