Guidelines for Group Decision Center Surveys

1. Identify what you want the survey to accomplish. This involves determining what you want to find out, who you want to ask, and how you want to use the information. Determining the outcome will focus your survey and result in better information.
2. Write your initial survey. Concentrate on getting the information that you want; grammatical revisions come later. If you need any help writing or revising questions during the process, the NDSU Center for Writers can help.
3. Include an introduction to your survey. Explain who is asking for the information, what data is being asked for, and why you are asking for the information. This will be similar to your letter of invitation.
4. Include strong headers to form your questions into groups. This will enable the recipients to answer your questions more accurately by keeping them on the subject of the questions.
5. Include an "Improvement Clause" at the end of your survey. Asking how you can make your survey better next time will greatly enhance the future effectiveness of your survey, and give you insight on interpreting your questions.
6. Setup a survey planning session with the Group Decision Center. In this session, the GDC staff will help you to determine the appropriate focus and question types for your survey. Please bring your initial survey questions as well as welcome and thank you letters to accompany your survey to the planning session. After the GDC planning session, you will have a good idea of any major revisions that need to be made to your survey.
7. Contact NDSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) to gain approval for the administering of your survey: All NDSU students/staff/faculty are required to do this. All other clients will be advised by the GDC whether this will be necessary. After gaining IRB approval, please submit a copy of the approval letter to the GDC. If you do not have IRB approval we will not put your survey on our system.
8. Finalize your survey questions into a text/word format and e-mail this to the GDC contact responsible for your survey. The GDC will then make any final suggestions/revisions that should be addressed. After any issues are addressed, the GDC will publish the survey for testing only.
9. Test the survey. The GDC will notify you when the survey is ready for testing. Please notify us of any problems with the survey functionality as well as any format/appearance changes that are needed. After the survey is posted, any question additions or major revisions will be charged for on an hourly basis. After the survey appears to be working and everything appears correctly, notify the GDC of this.
10. The Group Decision Center will notify you of when the survey is ready to "go live." After this notification is received, you may invite the appropriate audience to visit the URL as indicated by the GDC. NDSU List Serv Messages are not administered by the GDC.
11. After the survey has been posted for the specified time, the data will be collected. The GDC will contact you regarding the format of data/reports you require. Note: 3 filter reports will be available at no cost.

Top of Page

E-Mail: ndsu.gdc@ndsu.edu
www.ndsu.edu/gdc
NDSU Group Decision Center
320 Family Life Center
Department 2030
P.O. Box 6050
Fargo, ND 58108-6050
Phone: 701.231.6414