Tips for Maximizing Survey Response Rates

Survey respondents are usually motivated by one (or more) of these factors:

1. I care and want to be helpful.
2. I’m interested in the topic.
3. I get rewarded.

The first two factors are examples of intrinsic motivations - the person is responding because they care about the topic or the impact of their response, even if there is nothing “in it” for them. The third factor requires us to tap into reward systems wherein the respondent feels they personally benefit from taking the survey. 

Leveraging Intrinsic Motivators 

“Effective promotional campaigns appear to increase response rates by about 4 to 5 percentage points. This is particularly true for first-year students, where promotional campaigns, especially those that use multiple strategies (e.g., posters, advertisements, YouTube videos) and coordinate among multiple campus offices and constituencies, appear to increase response rates above and beyond lottery incentives alone (Sarraf & Cole, 2014).

To maximize the impact of intrinsic motivation on your response rates, think about how and when you communicate about the survey. Why should a respondent care? What is interesting or curious about your survey? What will this experience be like for the person? How will it help your institutional community?

When you compose a written or verbal message about the survey, make sure you include these three elements:

• Preview the why: What is the purpose of this survey? Why does it matter to the respondent, to you, to your community?
• Explain how results will be used: How will the results be used to improve the student experience at your institution?
• Use results and share out how: When possible, give examples of exactly how you have (or will) use aggregate data to invest in resources or support. 
  • For example: “Based on last year’s responses, we increased the availability of tutoring services for our transfer students in their first 3 weeks.”

Leveraging Extrinsic Motivators 

Offering a reward such as a raffle or lottery prize is proven to work, at least to give a slight bump to response rates. (NSSE has seen increases in the range of 3 - 5% when incentives are used.)

But which prizes or rewards will be most motivating? A number of studies have been done comparing responses to different incentives, and there are some commonalities:

• Something for everyone is the most compelling. However, this can be more limiting from a budget perspective.
• A higher probability of winning is more encouraging than larger prizes with lower likelihoods of winning. For example, a 1 in 15 chance to win a $50 gift card may result in more responses than a 1 in 100 chance to win an iPad. 

Budgets are often the limiting factor when it comes to rewards, so here are some practical (and creative) tips for maximizing the impact of your resources:

• Leverage existing rewards or compensation in your program to drive behavior.
  • For example, Mentor Collective partner Coppin State leverages their paid peer mentors to have mentees pull up the survey in their next 1-1 meeting/interaction and complete it on the spot.
• Keep the “everyone wins” approach budget-friendly with ideas that may already have line items in your programming budgets.
  • …come to the advising office on Friday for coffee & a cookie.
  • …an invitation to an exclusive event, such as a reception at the President’s house
• Create urgency to drive responses quickly with rewards based on timing.
  • “Next 100 respondents” 
  • “All responses by Friday” 
• Offer a non-monetary prize, particularly if they may be difficult to come by for the respondent population.
  • Parking passes, early registration, or great seats at a campus event
  • An exclusive invite (lunch with president)
• Donations can be compelling! 
  • $1 for every response
  • “We’ll donate $100 if we get 100 responses.”

Selecting Winners

When it comes to selecting a winner, ensure you use a random process which can be done in an old fashioned way (pick a number out of a bucket) or using an online resource like a random number generator or even a ChatGPT prompt (“Select 4 numbers between 1 and 565.”) 

Promotional Best Practices

For transparency, it’s often good practice to say in advance how many prizes you will award (“we are giving away five $50 bookstore gift cards”) and also to make the timeline known (“winners will be contacted by the Dean’s office on Friday, November 23.”) This is also a great way to leverage social media - if a student provides permission, you can take a little photo of them picking up their prize and post it on Instagram or TikTok to create more buzz about your mentorship program and feature your students.

Using Motivators with Mentor Collective

As a part of the Mentor Collective platform, participants are asked to complete various surveys throughout the program. You are encouraged to take advantage of the suggestions above to maximize assessment survey responses and/or post-session survey responses.