Handy hints for distributing surveys to students

You have spent hours of your life designing your survey and are finally ready to set it free and feel excited about watching the responses fly in — I get it!

As a communications professional, I design information for a living and secretly hope our students will find the topic just as interesting as I do. However, no matter how hard we try sometimes our work does not return the engagement from our audience that we think it deserves. This is particularly true for surveys when we consider how much information is screaming at students for attention.

Students’ engagement with surveys varies depending on the time of year, topic, and the potential of reward, i.e., the chance to win something. Generally, I email students a survey once because reminder emails tend to clutter inboxes and do not produce significantly higher engagement.

Sometimes the best place to promote a survey is in MyUni.

If your survey is for a certain cohort of students, then MyUni would be appropriate. Whereas a general survey for all students would be better suited to Student News.

MyUni is another option for survey engagement. Specific course coordinators can place surveys into individual courses as an announcement and a page. This option can provide more opportunities for ongoing engagement because it remains visible for longer periods. Unlike emails that disappear from the screen when pushed to the bottom of the list. Want to know more? Contact your course coordinator/s to place a survey in MyUni.

What can I do to improve engagement?

Consider the time of year — students will be less motivated to complete a survey during exams and breaks.

Think about the power of rewards — the possibility of getting a reward encourages us to act, so offer your survey recipient the chance to win something of value such as a gift card. Read more about the science in The Conversation.

Assess the value of people’s time — when we have an idea about how much time it will take to fill out a survey, we are likely to make a quick value assessment. Would you rather spend 5 minutes filling out a survey, or 15 minutes? Perhaps you’re like me and you’d rather spend 15 minutes sipping a coffee and watching the world go by. If not, a progress bar is a great way to gamify the experience of filling out a survey to encourage users to keep going and complete the task.

Do you have any other tips? Let me know dasecomms@adelaide.edu.au