Survey rewards

Have you ever taken a survey that offers you a reward at the end?

That reward is an incentive to get you to take the survey. If you’re clued up about offering survey respondents a reward (by knowing when and how to do it), this can help you collect more reliable responses.

Incentivising your surveys may seem like a no-brainer. If you offer people a reward to take your survey, they’ll be more likely to take it than if you offered them nothing at all.

But consider this: your reward may be attracting the wrong kind of respondent. Let’s suppose you run a pet shop and you want to find out the sorts of things that pet owners value when it comes to their pet’s care. If you don’t know exactly who you are sending your survey to, you may end up contacting some people who want your reward but don’t have pets.

Offering everybody a reward for taking your survey can encourage satisficers (people who misrepresent themselves or rush through surveys to the detriment of your survey results) who just want to get their hands on your reward.

However, incentivising isn’t all bad. Offering survey rewards can help you encourage hard-to-reach audiences to take your survey. You can even offer your respondents indirect rewards benefiting a third party, such as a charity. However, you should consider the circumstances carefully before deciding whether or not to incentivise your survey.

Although incentivising surveys can have its drawbacks, it will increase your response rates. Before you opt to offer survey incentives, have a think about whether they are really necessary by asking yourself the following questions:

What is my target population? If you know you have access to people who you would like to take your survey (for example, existing customers or a target demographic from an expert service such as SurveyMonkey Audience), you may feel more comfortable offering an incentive. Those respondents’ answers are probably relevant and you may want to give them extra encouragement to complete your survey. If you’re sending out your survey to just about anybody, you may want to have another think about offering a £15 gift card to everybody who answers your questions.

What’s my relationship with my survey respondents? If you’re hoping to reach people who have purchased your product, it may be worth offering them a little something to encourage them to take the time to give you product feedback. However, you probably don’t need to incentivise your survey if you’re asking your students to evaluate your course, because they’re more likely to see that it comes from a place of authority (and they’ll take your survey more seriously).

Are my respondents interested in my survey topic? If you send out an online local area questionnaire to people in your area who attended a meeting about whether or not there should be a new community centre nearby, you don’t need to offer them anything to take your survey: they’re already interested in the issue and don’t need any encouragement to share their opinions.

How long is my survey? How complex are my survey questions? You may want to offer your respondents a little something extra if you’re asking them to fill out a 10-page survey or a survey with questions that require more thought than “Do you own a car?”. This shows that you value their time and appreciate them devoting some of it to completing your survey.

Once you’ve decided whether or not you’re going to offer your survey respondents a direct reward, such as a prize, gift card or prize draw entry, choose which method you’ll use to reward your survey respondents.

Choose rewards that are most likely to appeal to anybody responding to your survey. And be mindful of your budget, especially if you’re offering everybody a reward. (You may want to set up your close survey option to stop collecting responses after a defined period of time or number of responses.)

Also, one of the most important aspects of offering survey incentives is getting your legalese in order. Write up your legal terms and conditions and run them by a trained legal professional to ensure that your offer is legally watertight.

Learn all about how to incentivise surveys when you use SurveyMonkey to create and send online surveys.

So, incentivising surveys can increase response rates, which is great, but may encourage satisficing, which is not great. In order to minimise the number of people who take your survey solely to earn a reward, you may want to try using indirect rewards.

In fact, we know all about indirect rewards because it forms the basis of our survey response service, SurveyMonkey Contribute. Instead of paying our survey respondents to take our surveys, we donate $0.50 to the charity of their choice every time they fill one out. This makes them less likely to rush through surveys out of pure self-interest.

We get responses, they donate their time and charitable causes benefit from their generosity. It’s a win-win-win!