Surveys can be an effective way to gather larger amount of data about a specific aspect of the community. I’ve been running annual salary surveys for the Koodiklinikka community since 2021 and here are some principles I’ve learned through that.
Collaborate
The best way to build a good survey is to do it together with the community. Set up a base of questions and then offer them for the community to comment, adjust, add new ones, remove unwanted ones and so on.
Starting with some questions helps people get started easier than a blank canvas.
Give people time to think, discuss and come up with ideas.
Keep it simple
A big mistake with surveys is to have too many mandatory questions. It’s harder to get a lot of people to participate if it takes them 30 minutes to answer or there are pages after pages to work through.
In our salary surveys, we keep the amount of questions small and tightly focused and make every question optional so people can participate by providing information they are comfortable sharing.
Publish the data with an open license
Don’t hoard the data. If it’s provided by the members of the community, they should have full access to the data.
This enables them to also make their own analysis and contribute to the common by publishing them.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
It takes effort to get people to participate. Every time I promote our survey in our Slack, I create dozens of memes and then post the best ones on regular intervals: in the beginning, daily and towards the end I do it bit less frequent.
Some people only visit your platform once every now and then so not sharing frequently enough risks missing them. Others may see it multiple times but it takes the right moment combined with the right message to actually catch them at a moment when they are in the right setting to answer.