Tips for Conducting On-Campus Surveys 

• Learn about the rights of research subjects and follow procedures for submitting your protocol to the W&L Institutional Review Board.
• Things to consider including in your initial contact e-mail or letter to participants:

----the purpose of the survey, and how the results will be used

---who you are representing: an on-campus organization or office, a publication, or possibly a class you are doing the project for

----whether or not survey responses will be confidential (in most cases they will be; be aware that not having an expectation of confidentiality may result in biased responses or make people not want to respond at all)

---your contact information, in case respondents have any questions or concerns

• When sending e-mails about your survey, you can highlight and drag and drop lists of survey participants’ e-mail addresses into Groupwise.  To protect the privacy of survey participants, drop the list of participant e-mails into the “BC:” (blind copy) line at the top of the e-mail.  Put your own e-mail in the “To:” line, so you that you will receive confirmation that your e-mail to survey participants went through.
• Sending out a polite follow-up reminder after a week or two to people who didn’t respond to your original contact can be helpful to boost your response rate. However, it is our experience that doing more than one follow-up doesn’t increase response rate appreciably, and *does* make the people who keep getting repeated  reminders irritated.
• Don’t expect a 100% response rate on your survey.  Our office has found that for most surveys we send out, 35-65% is typical.
• Think about how you are going to maintain your survey data in a database and how you want to analyze it *before* you send it out.  It is a common mistake for beginning survey designers to collect much more data than they are prepared to analyze or interpret.  A twenty-question survey that has a five-choice scale (Poor-Fair-Good-Excellent-No opinion) generates 100 different frequency counts!  If you don’t need or aren’t prepared to sift through that much data, consider asking fewer questions, or giving fewer options on individual questions.  Also, think carefully about asking open-ended questions; while they can be valuable sources of information, the results are often difficult to analyze.