Commercial Mediation Survey: D.I.Y

I have had some offline correspondence around my mediation survey posted yesterday - yes, by all means feel free to use it.

I found it to be a great marketing exercise giving me a good excuse to contact my best repeat clients and those who I had not heard from in a while.

Some tips if you are thinking of doing your own survey;

1. Don't be tempted to send out a paper based form - make sure your survey is online. It's so much easier for respondents. I produced mine via my mediate.com dynamic website that allows me to easily produce such forms.

If you don't have a mediate.com website (and you should because you will go a long way to find such a cost effective online presence) you can use the free and easy to use surveymonkey.com to produce your own online form.

2. Before I sent the survey link by email I rang my target clients to ask for their assistance with the survey - again another excuse to make contact and I got a number of invitations for a coffee and even the promise of some new jobs!

3. Send respondents a paper copy of the summarised/sanitised results - why paper? Because you can include a personalised handwritten note thanking them for their time and highlighting a couple of interesting themes in the collective responses. I also included a chocolate fish.

4. My wonderful online buddies, Diane Levin and Tammy Lenski gave me valuable feedback on my draft questions and overall design of my survey before I took it on the road. These guys really know their oats.

Make sure someone apart from you test drives your survey or at the very least get some design tips from Survey Monkey's design video tutorial.