What is a community survey?
A community survey is described as a compilation of survey questions sent out to a filtered target audience to understand more about a particular community. It is an online survey software capability that enables sending a survey to a pre-selected enrolled audience. This ensures high data quality and high response rates because the community members have already shown intent to participate in a research study.
For example, if an organization intends to launch a new line of diapers for babies who want to start swimming early, they would like to make sure this ‘concept’ would have a considerable amount of demand and that young moms would pay for it. To gain insights into it, you should survey these young moms. This is an upfront selection of moms the organization can recruit based on qualification criteria (e.g., moms who had babies in the last three years). This organization can then send a community questionnaire to these moms who voice that market segment.
LEARN ABOUT: Survey Mistakes And How to Avoid
As I mentioned in my blog last month, community management encompasses several procedures that affect the quality of survey results. Processes include authenticating who is in a particular community, gathering information about them over time, monitoring their behavior and response rates, tracking the number of surveys they participate in, and making sure the community is engaged.
A community survey also offers the ability to recontact community participants over time for longitudinal studies or product testing.
Providers who source people from random clicks on advertisements, known as river sample, or provide access to multiple sellers of a sample via a portal or platform, known as aggregators, cannot replicate this quality of engaged and committed audience to a community. In a community, you control the selection; therefore, better sampling methodology is practiced, helping to ensure consistency, particularly in sourcing methodology, from start to finish.
What are community survey questions?
Community survey questions are described as questions used to gain insights from the members belonging to a community. They may be qualitative survey questions or quantitative survey questions, depending on the community manager’s research needs. Researchers pose questions to the community members to monitor socio-economic factors, health, wellbeing, employment, etc. and understand the needs of the community better.
As a researcher or a community manager, ensure that these questions are simple to understand and easy to interpret. Remember that though members of the community share some common traits, not everybody is at the same level. Style your questions based on the type of data you want to collect. Quantitative surveys are broad and ask the members questions about all kinds of needs. On the other hand, qualitative studies are short and less structured but gain a lot of information about the member’s motivations and reasons. Both types of surveys are also prevalent and helpful to the community manager or the researcher.
Top 10 community survey questions you cannot afford to miss!
Taking the above-discussed example further, let’s consider a community for young parents. Here are ten questions you can include in your community surveys:
- Which brand do you currently prefer to buy diapers? – This question can give your organization a fair idea of what the customer prefers and analyzing the results collected. You can decide who your competitors will be and how your organization can develop a better product and implement a better marketing strategy in comparison to the competitors.
- Which aspects of parenthood would you like to discuss in your young parents’ community? – Young parents are always eager. Eager to learn about their babies, what products would the baby need, milestones the baby would achieve soon, etc. Gaining insights into this question can help the marketing team in developing an ideal product positioning strategy that can lead to practical results.
- Can you relate with other new parents? – New parents often connect because they face similar challenges in their routine lives, share similar future goals, and above all, their love and thoughts for children.
- Does your workplace have baby care facilities? – It’s often discussed within families, that it takes a village to raise a child. In modern times, this village also includes the parents’ workplace. A supportive workplace can be a huge relief to parents in either having a baby care facility on their premises or policies for young parents.
- If you were to buy essentials for your baby, what would they be? – Purchasing products for babies can be time-consuming and difficult. It is vital to collect information about preferred products so that your marketing team designs or enhances a product range on that basis.
- How much does your spouse contribute to raising your child? – Some partners believe in helping each other, while some of them have different allocated responsibilities. A researcher can include this community question to understand the thought process among new parents.
- Hypothetically, if your child starts crying in the middle of Walmart, what will you do? – Parental instincts are varied. To know a community better, situational questions such as this one should be asked.
- Is being a parent stressful? – New parents are often asked how they are coping with the new role of being a parent. This question is quite popular with new parents at work and otherwise. Marketers working in the baby care sector can come up with products that make this role less stressful.
- What type of toys does your child like? – This community survey question can be vital for those organizations which deal with baby toys. Analysis of the answers will be useful in designing products, their pricing, and overall marketing model.
- How often do you go out without your child? – A community of new parents can find it challenging to spend time with their spouse or have some time to themselves. Spas, salons, restaurants, etc. can benefit from addressing the fact that new parents need special care and market their services.
LEARN ABOUT: Product Survey Questions
Things to consider before deploying a community questionnaire
Two things to consider before deploying a community survey, that is critical to dependable research responses and repeated surveying are:
- The breadth of the survey
A large community without the breadth of audience types is like doing market research with tunneled vision. Audience reach has a direct bearing on the ability to effectively field a research study (also known as feasibility) and on tapping into low-incidence audiences. Large communities or panels better represent particular, hard-to-find audiences – such as vets or contractors.
You can control audience types across a single community – the ability to source different audience types across different sourcing methodologies – provides the variety and breadth needed within a first-party asset to collect accurate data.
- The depth of the survey
If you are looking for high engagement for a study that requires the audience to have niche knowledge or experience already, the recruitment process has to be explicitly tailored so that you can augment the member profiles with these attributes. If this is not possible when you run longitudinal community surveys, you can expand your current member information. These additional member attributes can be used to select the target member list to ensure you only field surveys to the members who are relevant to that study.
