Getting Personal Info in Surveys

Data helps you make decisions. Advertisers pay millions of dollars every year for data on potential customers, using meta data provided by Google, data collectors, and more in order to figure out how to target their advertisements to those that will make purchases. As a company, you wish you could ask 1,000,000 questions to get an accurate answer this time, because more data is better.

But you can’t always get all data. Part of that is simply burnout. There is no respondent that will fill out an entire survey simply because you ask them to.

Some respondents won’t even go beyond 10 questions. Some may not even click "Start." The other issue is that many people do not want to answer questions that ask for personal information, and the more they feel like you’re trying to learn too much about them, the less likely they are to stay. Any company that asks for personal information needs to do so carefully, because asking for that data the wrong way can increase dropout dramatically.

Learn more about how to increase survey response rates .

Before you even begin, ask yourself if you genuinely need to collect that personal information. You’d be surprised how often the answer is “no.” Many companies ask for demographic data, for example, only to find that their samples aren’t necessarily big enough to draw any real conclusions or they have no use for the data anyway. With that in mind, when you do have to collect personal information on your respondents, consider the following: Anonymous Survey Yes, you may need to collect personal information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to collect information that can be linked to a specific person.

If you make your survey anonymous , you’ll be far more likely to get personal information from your respondents. The SurveyMethods software has a label on all anonymous surveys to help increase the visibility and assurance of anonymity. Anonymous surveys allow you to ask more questions knowing it cannot get back to the respondent.

Ask Non-Personal Questions First You need to make sure you’re building trust with the respondent, otherwise there is simply no way that they will want to answer questions that ask for personal information. You can do that by making sure you have less personal questions first. This will start to build trust with the reader so that they “get to know you” and feel less imposed by your personal questions.

Explain Your Reasoning If you have to ask a personal question, explain your reason for asking. Make sure that the individual knows that their answer is anonymous (if it is) and that you’re asking for a good reason, and not because you’re simply trying to get more information on them. The more they trust you have their best interests in mind, the more likely they will provide you with a response.

Do Not Require an Answer If you want personal information but you don’t need it, consider not requiring the answer. If the respondent can move forward without answering, they will at least continue the survey – and possibly feel less pressured to answer. Personal questions are a part of a lot of different surveys.

As long as you make sure that you take the time to build trust and prove that the answers will not be used against them, there are ways that you can ensure that people will still answer – or, at the very least, continue through the survey.