What are the common challenges to getting high response rates?

Not getting enough survey responses is called a “low response rate.” This is a common challenge for organizations. The first step to increasing or ensuring high response rates is to better understand the reasons for low response rates.

Some of the most common reasons include:

1. Offsite Surveying. Offsite surveying is when clients receive the survey while away from your program or site (e.g., at home). Offsite survey methods can include email, text, mail, or phone/video conference, and they typically yield much lower response rates than onsite methods. Clients often have busy lives and other commitments or concerns that make it difficult for them to take a survey on their own time, without oversight and encouragement from staff/volunteers.
   • If offsite surveying is necessary or your chosen method (e.g., clients are geographically dispersed or not in regular face-to-face contact with the organization), we recommend the following best practices to increase response rates:
     • Survey soon after service delivery. The longer you wait to survey clients after service delivery, the lower your response rate is going to be. Sometimes, organizations may wish to bundle the L4G survey with outcomes surveys that are sent to clients months after service delivery. We advise against this — in addition to lowering response rates, it’s possible that clients may not fully and accurately remember their service experience after this amount of time. Similarly, we have found that surveying past clients (e.g., alumni) results in lower response rates than surveying those whose relationship to the organization is ongoing.
     • Prepare your clients for the upcoming survey: Studies reviewing a “pre-notification” — letting clients know about an upcoming survey they’ll be asked to take in the near future — suggest that priming clients helps increase response rate.
     • Be strategic with your survey invite: Keep your survey invite short and, if you’re surveying digitally, place the survey link near the top of the invitation so recipients are more likely to click on it. In addition, research done by SurveyMonkey showed that among surveys they reviewed, response rates were highest for survey invitations sent out on Monday (10% more responses than the average response rate), and lowest for invitations sent on Friday (13% fewer responses than the average response rate). Responses peaked in the morning and the afternoon.
     • Use incentives. Incentives are particularly helpful with offsite surveying as they provide additional motivation for clients to complete a survey that they may otherwise be too busy to complete. 
     • Make the “ask” personal and authentic. Explain to clients why the survey is important and what the data will be used for. With email surveys, consider having the messages come from a staff member that clients will recognize (e.g., case managers emailing their clients individually). During the COVID pandemic, some organizations have had success with phone surveys, as clients are eager for more personal connection. The more you incorporate a personal touch, the higher your chances of success. 
     • Send reminders. Reminders help increase response rates. According to research done by SurveyMonkey, the 48 to 72 hours after your initial survey invite are the best time to send reminders. Be aware though that reminders become less effective the more you send out; a review of survey methods suggested that 1-2 reminders resulted in a higher response rate; additional more reminders help, but have diminishing returns. Consider using SurveyMonkey’s Email Invitation collector to send automated reminders. (Note that this feature isn’t supported by the L4G web app, so you’ll need to program the collector in SurveyMonkey directly. Remember to make responses anonymous). If you’re still looking for more responses after your reminders have gone out, consider supplementary outreach to encourage participation (e.g., use phone calls and text messages to supplement email reminders). 
     • Make responding easy. Ensure surveys are in the correct language; keep surveys especially brief for offsite surveying; and, if you are mailing paper surveys, include a self-addressed return envelope with postage so clients can easily mail it back. Anticipate barriers to responding and minimize them as much as possible.
     • Monitor representation of your sample. With a lower number of responses, it’s especially important to check that your sample is representative. Remember to not only monitor how many respondents you have, but who is responding and intervene if you’re noticing low representation from client groups. For example, you might monitor which sites respondents are coming from — if a site doesn’t have any responses, then you know you need more follow up with clients from that site. Or, you may notice certain client demographic groups aren’t responding, so then can prioritize underrepresented groups in your outreach.
     • Consider “virtual onsite” survey administration. If delivering services virtually, incorporate time to take the survey at the end of a virtual class/session or remote service delivery (e.g., post the survey link onscreen, email/text the survey near the end of the appointment). With dedicated time and staff available to provide guidance and encouragement, clients may be more likely to complete the survey. 
2. Staff or Partner Challenges. Oftentimes, other staff or even partner organizations are the ones responsible. This can pose challenges if staff or partners do not understand the purpose of the survey, are not fully bought into the process, do not have a plan for consistently distributing and collecting surveys, or are too busy to administer surveys. If you suspect low response rates are due to staff or partner challenges, see this article on best practices for engaging staff or partners in data collection and this article about getting general staff buy-in to the feedback process.
   • While the dynamics of each staff or partner relationship are different, we recommend the following best practices:
     • Establish a shared purpose. Fully explain to staff and partners what the survey is for and how the data will be used. Often, front-line staff understandably feel that surveys are a distraction from their “real” work with clients. Emphasize that survey data collected will be useful for them because it will help them better understand their clients and improve their programs. Also, make clear that this data will not be used punitively with staff or partners (a general best practice we recommend).  
     • Involve colleagues in design. Where possible, involve staff and partners in designing the survey instrument. Brainstorm custom questions with them and ask them how they think surveys should be administered (both how and when). If they will be administering surveys, they will have insight into how (e.g., paper versus a text) and when to do this. 
     • Share results early and often. One medical nonprofit in L4G had very low staff buy-in, until the organization closed the loop with staff. Staff were pleased to find that feedback was largely positive and there was “nothing to fear” from asking clients to take the survey. Responses rose significantly in the next survey administration. For partner agencies, it will be important to have a process for them to reflect on their data and prioritize changes. One L4G food bank met quarterly with partner pantries to share results and discuss next steps. Another food bank asked each partner to come to them with one thing they were going to address each survey round based on the feedback. They then worked in partnership to support the implementation of these changes.
     • Consider staff and partner incentives. Sometimes it can be helpful to use incentives or create a friendly competition among staff or partners. You can send updates on the number of surveys received per site/staff/partner and provide a reward to those who make a certain threshold (e.g., free lunch). Even better, make the competition a shared goal, where as long as in total the organization/network receives a certain number of responses, everyone will get a reward. This may work for some working environments but not all.
     • Lastly, if you are working with partner organizations and have discretion about which partners will field surveys, consider starting off with those you have the strongest relationships with first — those  with whom you can easily do the steps above, before rolling it out to all of your partners.
3. Lack of Client Trust. In some cases, clients have limited trust that organizations have their interests at heart and are reluctant to participate in a survey. Public or subsidized housing providers are a prime example where there is often historic distrust between clients and providers. Overcoming this legacy is challenging and, frankly, cannot be accomplished by the L4G survey alone. However, see this article for a few words of advice when client trust is the reason for low response rates.
   • Some suggested best practices for raising response rates when lack of client trust is an issue:
     • Consistent actions. L4G works best as an outreach tool when it is done in concert with other activities that focus on building trusting relationships with clients. If an organization says it wants feedback, but other actions run counter to this spirit, your feedback initiative will fall flat.  
     • Incentives can be powerful for encouraging participation. The challenge then becomes how to get honest participation as opposed to “check the box” participation.
     • Include clients in the survey effort where possible. For example, if there is a client advisory council, have them weigh in on survey design, how best to promote the survey, and how best to close the loop. L4G organizations have even involved clients in data analysis, which can help provide added context.
     • Authentic messaging focused on the spirit of continuous improvement. We are hopeful that authentic and honest messaging from an organization, emphasizing that they are really committed to open listening (and even differentiating this survey from past efforts), can help engender trust. Using peer recruiters or a trusted staff member to promote and administer the survey can also help.
     • Choose another method: focus groups, conversations, and other means. In some cases, clients just need to vent and a survey is not going to provide the meaningful engagement they need. It is hard to build trust out the gate with a survey; it can be a good follow-on tool but not the opening salve. For one L4G organization, we actually told them to stop surveying when they were met with hostility from clients and encouraged them to just talk to clients and focus on relationship repair and hold the survey for later. 
     • Close the loop. Closing the loop can lead to more meaningful engagement in the next survey because it demonstrates that you are truly listening and acting on their feedback. While it is not an immediate fix for low response rates, it helps increase response rates in the long run.