A survey is a research method commonly used to gather information by asking participants questions.
Stakeholder surveys are normally designed to get community feedback or understand people’s perspectives and how they’re changing or being impacted by a project or organization. Or to understand how to better represent their perspectives when planning a project, so they can structure a project or initiative that better meets their needs.
The stakeholders surveyed are usually groups or individuals who have a direct interest in or are impacted by the project or organization. This might include members of the community, shareholders, customers, employees or a specific community group.
Gathering community feedback and running a stakeholder survey is probably quite similar to other surveys you may have conducted in the past. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow, from planning and promoting to analysis:
Confirm what information you want to collect, what outcome you’re looking for and what stakeholders you want to survey. Consider whether you’ll need to design multiple surveys for different groups.
Decide on the survey format (face to face, telephone, self-administered paper/online), ensuring it provides options for anonymity and provides confidentiality, so your stakeholders feel comfortable providing honest feedback and answers.
Design the survey, including a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions to help get a more accurate picture of your stakeholders’ perspectives and feedback. Common question formats include multiple-choice, multi-select, matrix table, ranking order, rating order and text entry. Depending on the survey format, you may be able to set it up so it’s integrated with your online stakeholder management system.
Share your survey and get the message out there to your stakeholders, explaining the benefits to encourage participation. If you have stakeholder engagement software, you can set up your survey distribution so each stakeholder response is attached to their contact record. Responses to a survey can be saved automatically into your stakeholder management software, eliminating the need for manual handling of the responses.
Collect and analyze the results, then publish these results internally, externally or both (if appropriate). Note that analysis can be tricky for many types of stakeholder surveys and community feedback. We’ll talk more about analysis below.
Consider repeating the process regularly (e.g. quarterly or annually) if you want to track and benchmark progress.
The best questions for your stakeholder survey will depend on who your stakeholders are and what key areas you want to track and understand their perspectives on. Regardless of these factors, you’ll want to keep your questions simple, short and straight to the point – confusing people will skew your results and reduce completion rate. And think carefully about how you phrase your questions. If you ask the right questions the right way, you’ll increase your chances of getting accurate and usable data.
Some example stakeholder survey questions you could include (and adapt to your own organization/project) are: