When the questionnaire has been developed it will need to be implemented as an online survey. The important factors here are:

• Visual presentation. It always amazes me how many bad looking online surveys are out there. It’s not uncommon for companies that spend millions each year maintaining their brand image to accept a really shoddy looking survey covered in other people’s logos and messages. This is usually a consequence of using one of the DIY survey tools.

If your audience is likely to include those with disabilities or other special needs then you should ensure that the online survey conforms to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines.

ORS can produce a highly polished survey that reflects the client’s brand quality in the same way as other marketing pieces the company would produce and can do so whilst ensuring it confirms to the latest accessibility guidelines.

• Structure. There are decisions to be made regarding the optimal survey layout and implementation of questions. Its better to split a survey with 30 questions into five pages of six questions each rather than have 30 pages each with a single question on it. Too many pages mean people lose interest and quit before completing it.

Decide which questions to put up-front. If you intend to analyse the data by profile factors then its best to ask these at the beginning of the survey rather than at the end. Some people might not fully complete but you may still want to analyse the information they did provide, so ask them while you can!

Decide which questions to make mandatory and which optional. If you force everything to be mandatory and the respondent can’t or won’t answer certain questions then you will be forcing them to either select something at random or drop out of the survey altogether. The better strategy is to only make key questions, particularly those on which routing is based, be mandatory and rely on providing an engaging questionnaire to encourage as much as possible to be answered.

Good use should be made of routing techniques as these can make the interview shorter and more relevant for the respondent thus increasing response rates and data quality.

ORS provide advice regarding layout and implementation during the questionnaire review included in the ORS Standard Survey Package.

• Survey length. A standard online survey for something like a market intelligence or customer satisfaction study should take around 10-15 minutes for the respondent to complete. Less than that and you are probably wasting an opportunity to gain information whilst you have them interested, more than that and you will see higher levels of drop-out.

It does of course depend on specific factors such as audience, topic and incentive. If your survey is particularly long then its useful to allow respondents to save their progress and return to it at a later point rather than having to do it all in one sitting.

All ORS surveys come with a suspend and resume facility as standard.

• Opening & Closing Pages. Your questionnaire should be book-ended with an opening and closing page. The opening page should welcome the respondent and outline key information such as the nature of the research, the estimated time it will take to complete the survey, the closing date of the study, any incentives being offered and the level of anonymity or confidentiality being provided. If a prize draw is being used then you must state when and where the prize will be drawn and how the winner will be contacted.

The survey should end with a closing page thanking the respondent for participating and confirming their eligibility for any rewards or prize-draw entry now that they have completed the study.

• Security. How safe is your data, both in terms of unauthorised access and also protection against corruption or deletion? If you are using a DIY tool or outsourced provider then make sure you check this with them before data collection commences.

ORS surveys are hosted on servers located in a state of the art hosting facility in London and feature various levels of security. Overnight incremental data backups are made every 24 hours.

• Performance. A slow survey will result in a high drop out rate. Pages should refresh within a few seconds of being submitted under load. There are two ways to help ensure good performance. Firstly, use a provider that you know has a good technical infrastructure. Ask to see some example surveys and see how they perform before you commit to them. Secondly, avoid emailing out tens of thousands of invitations to a survey at the same time. It is better to balance the load and make good use of server time by spreading access requests over a planned period rather than have everyone turn up at once.