Online Survey Case Study

Who? Young at Art

What did they want to find out?
In 2005, having invested heavily in new branding and the design and print of marketing materials for the Belfast Children’s Festival (BCF), Young at Art (YAA) wanted to know how aware of their brand and promotional campaign their attenders were.

In previous years, face to face research had been carried out. Consequently, sample sizes and response rates were low, meaning that the reliability of the results was questionable.

What was the solution?
Audiences NI suggested that an online questionnaire, distributed by email in the week following the festival, could yield better results. YAA and Audiences NI worked together to compile the content and the agency developed an online questionnaire on the BCF website. Every patron with an email address (circa 400 people, 20% of BCF’s marketing lists) was sent an email with a hyperlink to the online questionnaire, with completion incentivised by a prize of £25 M&S vouchers. Each completed and submitted questionnaire was sent via email to Audiences NI for collation and analysis.

Response
33% of all respondents submitted complete questionnaires on the day the email was sent; by the Monday morning 70% of all respondents had submitted their forms.

The final response rate for the online questionnaire was 27%. 98% of respondents wished to receive regular email updates on children’s events and 83% were happy to be contacted for future surveys/focus groups. 57% of respondents also left (often quite lengthy and overwhelmingly positive) comments.

What did it cost?
The entire cost of the project to YAA was £25 in vouchers.

Feedback
YAA’s Audience Development Officer said, “Working with Audiences NI on the questionnaire really focused our thinking about what we wanted to find out and how we would act on the results. It helped to have an objective perspective to cut through our tendency to ask anything and everything! We ended up with a succinct and focused questionnaire.

Using online methodology doubled our sample size. Face-to-face research in previous years typically generated an average of 45 respondents, whereas email yielded just over 90. Interestingly it allowed us to survey previous attenders who hadn’t come to this year’s festival – an impossibility using face to face techniques!

In terms of cost and efficiency this project worked extremely well for us; there was little extra staff time involved and the results were directly imported into Excel – no more inputting data from a pile of paper responses!”