Writing an excellent survey can be challenging; fortunately, we write a lot of them. Here are four quick tips to make your next survey be the talk of your office - assuming your office talks about surveys like our office does. That's not a weird thing, right? - Okay, well, maybe you can use these tips to silently make your next survey get much better results.

#1: Simple questions

Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." When it comes to building a survey, simple questions are the ultimate tip.

~~Nothing will help you get the outcomes you're hoping to achieve with your survey more effectively than making sure the surveying people understand what you are asking. ~~

Simple questions lead to better surveys.

Try utilizing a tool like readable (https://app.readable.com/) to make sure you're keeping things as simple as possible.

#2: Keep multiple-choice options simple

Are you sensing a theme? One of the most common problems is overwhelming your survey taker when you give a list of options. Make sure you've got the correct amount of options. Pick questions that have the least amount of ambiguity and overlap.

#3: Only ask one question at a time

Often we see questions that are attempting to gather information about two different situations. These questions not only confuse the survey taker but make deciphering data a challenge.

For example, a question like "Was the staff member friendly and helpful?" will force your survey taker to decide if they answer both of those questions with a single response or just pick one or the other.

A simple tip to avoid this situation - look for 'Ands' in your question sets and try and remove them.

#4: Don't stress the perfect survey

The quest for the perfect survey can get in the way of what you're trying to accomplish. No one writes surveys just for fun (okay, I'm sure there's someone out there). Surveys are a tool to achieve a goal. Often we're looking to get timely data on something we're doing. Remember that timely data is the goal. While you could spend years making the perfect survey getting the feedback you need to improve, update or expand will never happen unless you hit the publish button.

Keep it simple and get it out there - you can do it!

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