E-mail applications such as Gmail with Templates or Outlook with Quick Parts allow users to create a template e-mail, save it, and call it up either as a new message or as a reply to a message. Thus, if you want to thank participants individually, you can fire up the template and have most of your writing done for you once you create and revise it. You can even polish your message with an online service like Instatext [https://instatext.
Survey sponsors should not restrict themselves to publishing a single, comprehensive, final report. Opportunities exist for them to loosen up and turn out interim aggregated reports.
If you launch a survey and keep it open in the field for months, and if during that time you keep up a drum beat of publicity and reach-out efforts, you can decide to release a first report based on the early returns. More and more respondents hear about the survey and take part.
People who have been invited to take a survey and are debating whether to start it would prefer to know how many questions they face, how long it will likely take for them to complete the questions, what percentage are required (xref), whether they will need to do research, whether they are qualified(xref), or all these facts. I urge sponsors to cover these reasonable inquiries in the invitation email.(xref) Knowing the parameters of the survey ahead of time, a respondent who starts is more likely to keep going to the finish.
Error messages alerted by the hosting software after being triggered by a mistake or an omission on a questionnaire hark back to the jarring reminders that programmers confront. They tend to be blunt, cryptic, and annoying. You usually can’t move on through the survey until you unravel the knot. Even worse, if the designer of the question has set validation tests, a frustrated respondent, or one who legitimately does not want to be coerced, may find it hard to create a fake answer.
Survey sponsors crave as many qualified respondents as they can get. They resort to all manner of invitations and publicity to bump up the number. But one form of boosting, aside from taking the survey to learn from a report about a subject near and dear to the respondent, deserves special attention: offering an incentive for respondents. A handful come to mind from my consulting experience.
Sneak previews: For some invitees who are on the fence, knowing that they will receive a preliminary, quick view of the early findings might persuade them to plunge in.