Web Survey Guidelines (By Malcolm Conway)

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"When administering electronic surveys, consider the following tips:

• Protect Web surveys with passwords.
• Check the reliability of the hardware, the software, telecommunications, and the computer networks over which the questionnaire is administered.
• Offer a fax or other hard copy alternative to respondents who may not be able to take the electronic version of the survey.
• Provide a help number and a number to report problems.
• Stagger email invitations to help manage the survey.
• Use a multiple contact strategy like that used for mail (paper) surveys.
• Send reminder invitations to encourage responses. Make sure you can access the survey while it is live.
• Monitor the results as they arrive and provide summaries of the data in real time for review.
• Define criteria for what constitutes a ?complete? survey and follow up on incomplete surveys.
• Automatically validate the respondent?s input, if possible."