Surveys are often the first or only evaluation tool used by nonprofits, but poor survey design can produce untrustworthy or irrelevant results. This workshop will introduce the fundamentals of good survey design and will be beneficial to anyone who wants to start writing surveys or improve their survey writing.
You will practice writing and testing survey questions for your own project in a collaborative group environment. Please bring your existing survey to work on (or an idea for a survey you want to create). You will learn strategies to choose, write, and test survey questions that are effective for your audience and evaluation purpose. Using skills learned in this workshop, you will be able to write survey questions that improve the usability of the results and your respondents’ experience taking the survey.
As a result of participating in the workshop, participants will:
- Know why to choose a survey over other methods
- Be able to define the purpose of their survey
- Use the survey design process
- Understand the benefits and limitations of different question types
- Learn effective question-writing strategies
- Learn a range of strategies for testing their surveys
- Understand how to encourage survey participation
This workshop covers the fundamentals of effective survey design and is applicable to all survey tools. We will not cover survey graphic design or using particular survey tools, such as online survey software.
This workshop is done in partnership with the Maine Association of Nonprofits, and Kentucky Nonprofit Network.
Speaker Information
Sarah Cohn is a principal consultant at Aurora Consulting. She helps her clients discern their audience’s needs; think about their roles and opportunities as departments, organizations, and within broader networks; and build their internal capacity to measure the impact of their organizations and programs. In her experience, complex collaborations with diverse partners succeed when they build in time for listening and honest reflection. She sees her clients as the content experts and herself as the facilitator of nuanced conversations.
Al Onkka is principal consultant at Aurora Consulting. Al is experienced in promoting data-based decision making and organizational learning having worked in the field of evaluation since 2009. Al uses, and builds the capacity of others to use, an evaluative lens to help organizations develop, understand, and improve at the programmatic and organizational level. Al has a master’s degree in evaluation studies from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development and is a member of the Minnesota Evaluation Association’s board of directors.