Learning patterns/Involving communities in your survey

This is a Survey Support Desk learning pattern

A learning pattern forSurvey

Learning Pattern Library

Involving communities in your survey

problemInvolving communities in a survey

solutionThere are many opportunities, depending on your survey

creator• EGalvez (WMF)

created on4 November, 2015

What problem does this solve?

When starting a survey, it can be difficult to know when to include a wider community to support your work.

What is the solution?

When embarking on a new project, involving people will depend on which stage of the project you are on.

• Strategy phase - make sure to ask users or a trusted advisors whether the survey and survey goals are framed correctly.
• Question development - Its great to start questions on your own or with coworkers, but its better to involve users or community at some point. This means, reaching out to a handful (5 or fewer) people who can play a role in helping you develop questions
• Testing - This is a huge opportunity to involve volunteers or your target audience. You can send a survey to a small handful of people who can help you test a survey in its final form
• Reporting - Once the data is collected, make sure to engage users in the results. What are they learning from the data? Is it useful to them? Do they see why you are making certain decisions?