Improving Upon Your Next Member Survey
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
Conducting membership surveys is a common and wise practice among associations. If done correctly, they help an organization validate its assumptions, shed light on unexplored areas, improve upon current practices and programs, and help shape future initiatives. However, beyond the occasional tweak here and there, many haven’t revisited the structure and content of their survey instruments since they first developed them.
To maximize the insights gleaned from your next member survey, ensure it accommodates three key areas of feedback:
- Importance of both current and upcoming initiatives and member benefits
- Satisfaction with current and planned initiatives and member benefits
- Open-ended opinions on areas of interest and issues of concern
Start by evaluating the validity of each question on your organization’s previous survey instrument. You’ll likely identify both questions that can be eliminated and new questions that are important to add. In addition, many associations will seek the input of numerous staff members as they develop their survey instruments. While this is often a very useful step in the process, make sure it doesn’t lead to an overly lengthy survey. Rather, carefully edit and rank questions based on what the organization must know versus what would be nice to know in order to improve member services and benefits.
Avoid “stacking the deck” with questions that eliminate opportunities for members to share negative feedback. Also allow for “non-applicable” and “don’t know” responses rather than forcing members to select an answer or rating that doesn’t truly represent their stance.
While satisfaction ratings in various areas are critical to know, they won’t give your organization a complete picture of members’ opinions. Always include open-ended questions to which members can share their thoughts and opinions in their own words. Be prepared to be surprised by what they say,?? and to act on the areas in which opinions of enough members converge.
Of course, a thorough analysis of the results will enable your organization to correctly adjust its resources and goals. Consider ranking responses in a quadrant that separates topics into high importance/high satisfaction, high importance/low satisfaction, low importance/high satisfaction, and low importance/low satisfaction. From there, priority areas for improvement will become apparent.
