You've been assigned an analytical report.
When you've gone through the terms of reference, you realize that you're going to need the opinions of several people and to do that, you'll need a survey.
The overall purpose of a survey is to find out information so as to help make a decision.
A classic example is a government population census to give details about that population, its birth and death rate, where people live and the size of their households.
This helps government make decisions such as the level of health services required by aging populations, or whether birth rates are high enough for sustained growth or if immigration levels should be increased.
The kind of business survey you are called on to do is tiny in comparison to a census.
However, here are 5 elements you must deal with: 1.
Why are you doing the survey? What is the objective of the survey? What information are you trying to get and why do you need it? You need to be very clear about this so as to design your survey questions to get at that information.
2.
Who is your target population? You have to identify exactly who it is you want information from.
It may be customers of your company.
If the number of customers is limited, you might decide to survey all of them.
If there are a large number, you'll probably survey a small sample.
3.
How will you survey them? There are several ways in which to take a survey.
You might:

• Do a telephone survey with a number of questions
• Conduct an Internet survey
• Mail out a survey
• Do a series of interviews
• Do a combination of these, such a written survey and a series of personal interviews

The decision as to which route to follow is based on which method produces the information you need.
4.
Designing a questionnaire This is all about setting up the questions to get the answers you need.
In the kind of business survey you are likely to do, the K.
I.
S.
S.
principle applies.
In this case Keep It Simple and Short.
I'm a great believer in keeping things simple.
With a survey, the shorter the better.
I know that if someone calls me and asks if they can do a phone survey, I'll always ask how long it will take.
If they say three minutes then I'll probably help them, knowing that it'll take double that time.
If they say 10 minutes, I'll probably refuse since the actual time will be close to 20 minutes.
Then do you ask open-ended questions that allow the person to give a broad interpretation of what you're after, or close-ended questions that require specific answers? 5.
Interpreting the results Your job is to measure the results you get.
How will you do this? You might use a computer program to help you, like Excel.
You might need more complex software to interpret what you're after.
I like to keep things as simple as I can, sometimes measuring the results just using a sheet of paper and tabulating how various questions have been answered.
Note the volume of the responses and how that contributes to the purpose of the survey.
In upcoming articles, I'll treat each of these 5 sections in more depth.
If you're the writer of this analytical report, how will this survey fit into what you're trying to do and its findings? And what degree of importance does a survey have in the overall results? If the survey only accounts for 10% of the findings, you'd want to keep it as simple and as brief as possible.
If the survey has a much higher impact, you'll develop it based on its importance to your results.
Keep this in mind as you move forward.