How To Posting a Survey? Increase completion rate

[Brian Boru]

Hey you clicked on this thread, good job! You're now 15% thru this post

Acknowledge completion of the first task you can, even if quite trivial. At latest, respond at the end of the first survey questions page—usually the demographics questions.

This acknowledgement motivates the participant to keep going, and subsequent acknowledgements along the way reinforce that. My personal fav is a progress bar style which shows my completion percentage going up as I progress. An extra-special 'woohoo' for ¼, ⅓ or ½ completion should help.

Source

This is probably a variation on proven upselling techniques in retail.

 

[Hveðrungr]

Fwiw, this is literally my day job.

My personal fav is a progress bar style which shows my completion percentage going up as I progress.

This approach is actually quite out of favour nowadays, because many respondents don't like to see it going up so slowly. It can work in very short surveys, but not longer ones.

 

[Colif]

some indication of how long it is before starting would be nice.

I don't do surveys unless I have to. Often you have no idea when it will end.

 

[Brian Boru]

quite out of favour nowadays

So what would you recommend? Just frequent 'attaboy' encouragements?

indication of how long it is before starting

Almost all the surveys we get here do that, 'should take approx 10 minutes'.

 

[Hveðrungr]

So what would you recommend? Just frequent 'attaboy' encouragements?

Depends on whether you're working with panel sample or not. If you're working with panel sample they know what they're doing and they know they won't get paid unless they complete, so unless your survey is an hour long you can kinda do what you like. If you're only doing an unscientific survey that's being posted ad hoc on social media, your survey probably isn't long enough to worry about it either way and your survey is already so invalid that drop-outs are the least of your problems.

But yeah, if your survey is long and you're concerned about drop-outs for some reason then you could do increasingly frequent encouragements about how well they're progressing through the survey that at no point tells them exactly how far through they are. If you say “Great, you're halfway through!” (especially to social media or other inexperienced sample) then some proportion of them will think “wtf, this has already taken long enough” who would otherwise passively continue to answer your questions. Which leads to actually your best bet is often to not mention the survey time being taken at all because most respondents will get sufficiently in the zone that they don't think about it unless you remind them how much time they're wasting on your survey.

 

[Brian Boru]

your survey is already so invalid

Like most posted on here by college students?

 

[Hveðrungr]

Like most posted on here by college students?

Exactly like those, yes! Nothing they do can improve the data quality of a self-selecting sample, so they shouldn't waste their time trying to make the surveys better.