How to write effective survey goals

Survey goals are short, aspirational statements about what you'd like to achieve by running your survey. They can be used to help suggest questions when creating a Build Your Own survey.

You can have up to three survey goals. You need to add them in Step 1 to generate question suggestions in Step 3. Browse and choose goals from our pre-defined list, or write your own.

If you'd like to write your own, make sure to include the following in each goal:

1. Group: What group of people are you wanting to gather insights from? For example, is your survey targeting employees, a senior leadership team, ratepayers, patients, customers, volunteers, members, students, school staff, parents etc...
2. Environment: Are you asking questions about their experience at an organisation, community, school, medical centre?
3. Specific feedback point: What do you need to know about this group's specific experience relating to that environment? Include keywords on the topics you're specifically asking about? For example, values, bullying and harassment, training, conflict resolution.

This information helps to provide context which is used to match goals to questions.

Suggested format for writing goals

You can use this format to write survey goals:

To + verb + (group + specific feedback point + environment)

For example:

• To understand if employees are aware of and understand our organisation's core values.
• To explore employee attitudes towards health and safety practices at our organisation.

The order of 'group', 'specific feedback point' and 'environment' in the sentence may change slightly to support readability or grammar rules.

What to do if no questions are suggested

There is a chance no questions may be suggested for your survey goal(s).

This could be because:

• Your question library doesn't contain questions that relate to that topic: Questions are suggested by searching your question library and selecting ones that best match your survey goals. If you don't have any questions in your library that match your survey goals, this could return no results.

  Solution: Add more survey templates to your account subscription or write your own questions.

• Your survey goals might be missing some important information: If your goal is missing a key piece of information, like the 'who' (group) and 'what' (what you want to know), it may be difficult to match your goals to questions, and this could return no results.

  Solution: Take another look at your goals and check if they follow our suggested guidelines. Make some changes and try again.