Yes

Number of Questions

Your members are busy, especially young adult members. Be cognizant of their time by keeping your surveys as short as possible. Social media polls are great for a quick one-question survey to get feedback. For longer surveys, try to keep them between five and eight questions unless you are providing an incentive.

What Will You Do With the Information?

For longer surveys, make sure you know what action the information you receive from members will help you take. Think about this while writing the questions, or hire a professional who is experienced in writing unbiased survey questions. Don’t ask a question just because the response will be interesting to know. Make sure you can do something with the information.

A, B or C vs. Fill in the Blank

When it comes to understanding your survey data, it is much easier to see larger trends with quantitative data (A, B, C). If people choose from a defined list of options, you can quickly see the breakdown of opinions in the responses. If you want to get specific and tailored feedback, such as details on an issue a member is having, short-answer questions may be preferred. Just know that big-picture trends from short-answer questions will be more difficult to pull together.

Incentives

Don’t be afraid to provide a small gift or bill credit for longer surveys or feedback you get during in-person events. Logo merchandise or a $5 gift card to a local coffee shop or bakery can go a long way to getting high-quality responses. You might even provide a donation to a local charity for each response. Bill credits are also a good incentive—particularly for participating in a longer annual survey—if this is feasible for your co-op. If you are unable to provide all of your members with an incentive, hold a drawing for one or more larger prizes among all the respondents.

Helpful Tools

There are a number of survey tools that co-ops can use to build a simple feedback form. Here are a few free options that are easy to use:

Survey Monkey: The free basic plan lets you send unlimited surveys up to 10 questions each.

Typeform: Like Survey Monkey, Typeform’s free basic plan lets you send 10-question surveys, but they are limited to 100 responses per month.

Google Forms: As long as you have a Google account, you can create as many free surveys as you’d like and have the results immediately pulled into a Google spreadsheet.

Social Media: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all allow you to create polls for your followers to respond to.