I've recently been speaking with one member who has been circulating a series of questions to the user community in her organisation.

Her focus has been on identifying "hot-spots" of poor data quality in the business. She initially opted for Excel questionnaires via e-mail distribution but found this quite laborious.

I suspect that others have also struggled with the same problem so this article provides some simple techniques that should help you improve the effectiveness (and reduce the cost!) of any data quality surveys you take in future.

How to create a data quality survey for your organisation

Replace The Spreadsheet Approach With An Online Survey Tool

Let's imagine you wish to distribute 2,000 questionnaires around your organisation. You design your questionnaire, create an Excel spreadsheet to get the feedback, create your list of corporate e-mail addresses and then send an e-mail and attachment to everyone on this list.

You then wait for the response and work through the completed worksheets.

There is a lot of effort associated with this type of approach:

• If it takes you a couple of minutes to check and process each questionnaire that will result in at least two weeks of effort, taking time out from more important activities
• Chasing up the non-returned questionnaires takes effort and is non-value adding work
• It's not easy to quickly see who has yet to complete the questions and requires a gentle reminder!
• Designing a professional questionnaire in a spreadsheet tool such as Excel can be quite difficult if you lack the appropriate skills
• If you need to tweak the questionnaire there are associated headaches with managing the different versions scattered around the organisation

Fortunately there is a simpler and cheaper way to achieve this by using one of the online survey tools that will free up your time to process and act on the results.

Online Survey Tools

Here are just a few options you may wish to consider:

• Zoomerang: Standard online questionnaire management product
• Survey Money: Very popular online hosted product, great email facilities
• DabbleDB: More technical online database product, can be used for surveys and embedding forms on your own site
• WuFoo.com: Form builder, can embed forms in your own web pages or use the hosted option

I suspect that Survey Monkey will deliver most of what you need, is simple to use and attractively priced. The business case for these tools is a no-brainer compared to traditional approaches such as spreadsheet distribution via Email.

These solutions work by hosting the survey for you and providing a full range of messaging facilities to notify and track respondents who need to complete the survey. They also provide on-screen graphs and charts to help you gauge the success and completeness of the campaign.

Survey Activities Explained

This is a basic sequence of activities you would need to follow for a product such as Survey Monkey:

• Design your questionnaire using a text editor (I find mind mapping tools are actually better for this)
• To get ideas for questions look at the resources section at the end of this post
• Define the lists or categories for any radio or checkbox style questions
• Create any modifications of your questionnaire for different user segments (eg. technical vs business community, marketing/sales vs operations)
• Register for Survey Monkey and pay for the appropriate package depending on the number of respondents required, there is a trial option available
• Create a draft survey, here are some basic design tips:
  • Try and incorporate a blend of both free-form, emotive questions and also tightly defined metric questions
  • Where you use radio or check box questions always add an 'Other ...' option so the respondent can post additional categories you may have omitted
  • Group your questions into different sections and separate by splitting into pages or sections in the online form
  • Don't post too many questions, you will get less respondents
  • Add a section to enquire about feedback of the survey, that way the respondent can notify you of issues
• Select the appropriate distribution option (eg. Email, Website Link, Survey Printout)
  • I recommend the Email option as it instantly notifies you which respondents are yet to complete the form
  • Ensure that you select the option to allow users to go back and complete a part-entered survey, don't force them to complete it in one sitting
  • If you are running a survey on one machine, for instance at a conference or seminar, be sure to select the option that allows multiple surveys on one machine
• Create a list of email addresses and design email text
  • Ideally get the first name and department name along with the persons email address into an Excel style format
  • Personalise an email using the online generator, outline the objectives of the survey and the benefits to the respondent, create a pull not a push factor
  • Upload the email file with the associated data in the appropriate columns
• Test your survey campaign
  • Use the test option to send the email and survey link to a safe email address
  • Send the live survey to a small sample initially
  • When you are happy with the response, send the survey to the entire list
• Track the responses
  • Download the CSV file of the survey and check for any issues reported with the questions, modify where required so future respondents don't witness the same problems
  • Send follow-up emails (using the online tool) to any candidates who have not completed the survey
  • Import your final CSV file into an analytical product to identify any trends and issues that require action (Omniscope is a very useful tool for this and is free for 30 days but Excel, Access etc. are all fine for this too)

How To Link Your Questionnaire via an Intranet or Web Page

Many organisations use intranet sites that are automatically loaded whenever the user starts up their browser or perhaps you want your website visitors to complete a survey when they visit a particular page.

This presents a great opportunity to get your questions in front of a chosen community but designing these forms often requires skill, cost and time.

Fortunately, there are a couple of solutions around this:

• Redirect people to the hosted survey site: Simply post a link on the intranet or your website page that redirects the user to the survey page on the Survey Monkey (or other) site. Ensure that your web administrator allows the hosted domain to be accessible across the intranet.
• Embed a survey form into the intranet using a hosted survey product: Products like DabbleDB and WuFoo allow you to design a form which can then be embedded directly onto your own web page. This means that the user doesn't have to leave the intranet page they are visiting, they can simply enter their feedback directly on that page. There are also other widgets and Flash tools that allow information to be gathered in a survey, a quick search on Google will find the most popular products.

Some Useful Resources For Creating Survey Questions

All of the techniques above will help you deliver a survey but where do you get ideas for the questions in your survey?

To a certain extent this will be contextual but here are a number of resources I have found useful for building survey questions:

The Current State of Data Quality Survey: September 2006

Harte-Hanks Trillium Data Quality Survey

Data Quality Best-Practice Questionnaire

Journey to Data Quality (some great sections detailing survey questions, you can get this from our online bookstore)

Have you created a data quality survey? What were your experiences? Would you be willing to share your survey with our members so we can build a larger set of questions for the benefit of all?