Survey Fatigue

People are tired of taking surveys. Why? Because they don’t get the benefit. The organization who gives it does.

I regularly get a coffee in the morning at my local Starbucks. About once a month I get an email from them asking me to take their survey. They say that if I take the survey I’ll have the chance of winning a $100 gift card. I’ve taken this survey about a dozen times and have never won that gift card (not that I’m bitter). But why do they have to offer me the chance of winning the gift card? Because I’m not a beneficiary of information I’m giving them. The odds that my local Starbucks will get better because of the information I share, or that my drink will be cheaper because I don’t believe it’s worth the price I pay is slim to none and slim left town. So, they offer me the chance at the gift card so I’ll give them information that benefits them and their bottom line.

It’s not just Starbucks that gives surveys that don’t benefit the end user.

Our local power company sent me a letter in the mail. Inside was a $2 bill along with a note that said “Here’s advanced payment for taking the enclosed survey.” Translation? Their method of getting me to take their survey was guilt. They figured if they paid me in advance I’d feel guilty and fill out the survey. Manipulation at it’s finest. What’d I do? Showed my kids Thomas Jefferson on the bill, put it in my wallet, and threw the survey in the recycling bin.

This story repeats itself time and again in my life and yours. People are constantly clamoring for our data. Our information is valuable. Companies are willing to pay for it, have us gamble with it, or guilt us into giving it.

The people in your church deal with the same thing. Therefore, when you ask your congregation to fill out a survey - you unwittingly lump yourself in with every other company that’s clamoring for their data. Their default response, just like ours to most companies that ask us for our data? No thank you. I’d rather not.

“But,” you say, “it’s for their benefit…so we can get better as their church!”

That might be true, but it’s not what they hear. They hear what everybody else says to them every other day of the week. You can’t change that narrative without intentionality and wisdom.

How can you hope to give a survey at your church to better understand discipleship and ministry effectiveness instead of simply measuring marketing effectiveness?

1.     Stop calling it a survey. Don’t lump yourself in with every other organization that gives them surveys. The word is technically accurate, but avoid its connotation. Instead, call it an assessment. That word is much more focused on them. It’s not about taking their information, but instead about assessing where they are. That subtle shift will set the tone you desire. Also, make sure all of your staff always says assessment instead of survey. If you hear it, correct it. Help your senior pastor understand it. Words make worlds.

2.     Make the person who takes it the primary beneficiary and the church the secondary beneficiary. This is critical. If you tell them it’s about them but really make it about you - they’ll see through your spin just like they do with every single politician and marketing firm that has been doing it to them their entire life. How do you practically make them the primary beneficiary? We do it in several ways:

• Giving customized reports. When our congregation takes our Discipleship Assessment they immediately get a customized report that tells them where they are in their relationship with Jesus across 8 discipleship metrics. They also get three recommended resources to help them grow in each of their lowest two metrics. In other words, we make it beneficial for them to take the assessment, not just for us to get their data.

• Closing the feedback loop. Once we deploy the assessment, within 1-2 weeks, we ensure we tell our congregation one critical piece of information we learned and how we’re going to respond. For instance, we learned in 2022 that our programming efforts were not helping them grow in their emotional maturity at all. Since we believe deeply that healthy discipleship produces people who are emotionally mature, we were missing the mark. So we told our congregation this. We then said we weren’t sure exactly how to respond, but that we were exploring ways to help them in this critical area of their discipleship. (Notice that we didn’t lie, we didn’t say we had a plan that we didn’t have - but were honest). We then followed through. We discovered a way we could impact this area, piloted the program, and eventually launched the program as a result of that learning. All of this together showed our congregation that not only did they get benefit directly from the assessment in their individual report, but that we also used their information to improve as a church and help them.

• Never asking our congregation for information they’ve already given us. Ever. Respect them and listen the first time. This means we build our assessments so there’s logic that tells us if a future question is not applicable to them. That way they don’t have to select “N/A.” If it’s not applicable to them, we already know and have removed that question from their question set. It also means that we don’t ask them for the same information twice - even if it makes our life easier. If we have the choice of making our life more difficult or theirs, we choose ours. Every time.

3.     Don’t waste their time. We’ll cover this in a future post, but it’s worth repeating: Don’t ever ask for information that you find interesting but isn’t useful. Have a question you’ve asked that never leads to any actionable difference in your ministry or for their benefit? Get rid of it. It might be interesting to know (for instance) whether they live in an apartment complex, townhouse, or single family house…but if that piece of information isn’t useful and doesn’t lead to change, don’t waste their time by asking it. You can also get rid of questions that were useful at one time but are no longer useful. For instance we wanted to understand how people were invited to serve and what impact it had on the frequency of their serving. We asked it one year, learned from it, then got rid of it. The likelihood of the result changing year over year is marginal, so we cut the question in the following assessment. If we ever need it again, we can add it back. Avoiding needless questions values their time over our own curiosity.

4.     Give the assessment when they are already giving you time. In other words, if you’re a church leader: give your assessments on a Sunday morning. The people are already there, you’re communicating a level of importance by giving it during your most valuable time, and it shows them you’re serious about actually doing something with the information they’re giving you. If something is worth doing, do it when people are already there. When you do something communicates the value you place on it.

Survey fatigue is real. You feel it and so does your congregation. Adjusting your language and making the congregant the primary beneficiary and you the secondary beneficiary (not just in words but in reality) - builds trust. If you build that trust, your church will be willing to take the assessments.

With these above changes I’ve seen multiple churches overcome survey fatigue and achieve between 92% and 97% response rates. You can too.