Lake Superior College recently collected data for its 4th Priorities Survey for Online Learners, a standardized-ish survey from Noel-Levitz that helps schools measure the satisfaction of their online programs.  What’s neat (from my perspective) is that this year they offered their survey pool of over 2000 potential respondents the chance to win one of 40 2 GB USB drives for participating in their PSOL survey and got a responses rate of 23%. When they last did the survey in 2006 without offering an incentive they only got a 17% response rate. That’s a 23% increase in the response rate.

Now I don’t know a ton of details about how they marketed this survey versus the last survey, but based on conducting numerous studies myself I can definitely say offering an incentive — even just a chance to win — can have a big impact on the response rate for your survey. I’m not 100% sure why, but I believe it is because it gives people who are on the fence about spending the time it will take to complete your survey are swayed enough by the incentive to take the plunge.

In any event, if you are going to go to all of the trouble to write, collect, analyze, and report on a survey, offering at least a small incentive is a great way to boost your response rate (make sure you keep in mind the applicable laws regarding sweepstakes)!

• Lake Superior College PSOL Blog Entry

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news Tags: incentives, lake superior college, noel levitz, Priorities Survey for Online Learners, prizes, psol, response-rates, sweepstakes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:09 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.