How to make an effective survey to inform nonprofit rebranding
Get actionable insights for your rebranding initiative
A successful nonprofit rebranding initiative starts with understanding the needs and opinions of your stakeholders. A well-designed survey can provide invaluable insights into how people perceive your organization and what it stands for. However, designing an effective rebranding survey requires thoughtfulness and attention to detail.
Here are some key considerations when creating surveys to best capture your stakeholders’ feedback during a rebranding initiative for your nonprofit.
Timing
Decide when you’ll launch the rebranding survey and how long it will stay open. Consider the pace of your rebranding timeline so you can capture feedback about the changes at appropriate intervals. It is best to launch a survey in the fall, late winter, or early spring months.
We recommend distributing a survey within the first two to three months of your initiative once initial audits and one-on-one interviews are complete, which are steps that give important insights that inform the direction of your survey questions. The survey should stay open for at least 15 business days. However, 30 days is the recommended time frame. If the open period is longer, make sure to send a reminder email to recipients halfway through the participation period.
Questions
When it comes to crafting rebranding survey questions, it’s important to consider both the content and format of your questions. Ask questions that get to the heart of understanding how stakeholders feel about your organization. Consider using scales to assess sentiment, open-ended questions for deep exploration, and multiple-choice questions to quickly capture baseline information.
Questions should be designed to uncover factors that lead to brand affinity, including:
- Associations related to your brand
- Feelings associated with your brand
- Descriptions of your brand
- Experiences with your brand
Open-ended questions should elicit meaningful responses but be specific enough to give you actionable results. Example questions include:
- How do you feel about our nonprofit’s mission?
- How would you describe the mission of our nonprofit?
- Are there any changes that we could make to our existing messaging or visuals that would improve your opinion of the nonprofit?
- What words come to mind when you think about our nonprofit and its purpose?
- If you had one message to share about this nonprofit, what would it be?
Format
Choose a survey platform that is intuitive and easy to use. You want people to be able to complete the rebranding survey with minimal effort, so make sure to consider a user-friendly option. Other form considerations include:
- Consider audience demographics – Make sure you consider the age, language, gender and other demographic factors of your target audience in order to tailor the survey accordingly.
- Set response time limits – Setting a time limit for responses helps ensure that you don’t get overwhelmed with data and can also help avoid potential bias in answers.
- Use skip logic for efficient data collection – By using skip logic, you can ensure that respondents are only asked the questions relevant to their demographics, rather than all of them.
- Use visuals and images – Incorporating visuals into your survey is a great way to make it more engaging for respondents and also can convey complex ideas more effectively.
By keeping these considerations in mind, you can create a rebranding survey that effectively captures stakeholder feedback and provides meaningful insights into the success of the rebranding initiative. A key performance indicator associated with a well-designed survey is a completion rate of 20-30%. With good participation, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about how to move forward with your nonprofit’s rebrand.