As the saying goes, “your brand isn’t what you say you are, it’s what they say you are,” which is why audience research is essential to brand strategy and design work. Social impact organizations do their best to influence people’s perceptions of their organization, and every brand expression and experience they create is connected to their brand strategy. After that, it’s up to the people who engage with them—inside and outside the organization—to decide what they think and feel.
It’s a complex, multi-faceted dynamic with a pretty simple calculus: your brand is only as strong as how well you understand your audience, how effective you are in meeting people where they are, and if you deliver the value they’re looking for. If the goal is to have what audiences say you are become aligned with what you say you are, then how you show up in the world better be aligned with what matters to them.
There are a lot of ways to gain the insights needed to define and design a successful social impact brand. At a high level, one is through direct experience, and the other is through research.
On the direct experience front, everyone who works at an organization understands its audience to a degree based on their interactions and how open their eyes and ears are. Brand strategists and designers understand an organization’s audience based on how much they’ve worked in their sector or issue areas (which accumulates experience with similar or the same audiences).
On the research front, there’s a mix of scale and style to the approach. First is more qualitative and intimate: things like interviews, workshops, and questionnaire-style surveys. These are invaluable to gaining individual perspectives and nuanced understanding. Second is large, quantitative research: primarily statistically valid brand surveys that paint a picture at scale.
In my experience, qualitative research accomplishes a lot: it’s lean and effective for most nonprofits working on their brands. Experienced internal stakeholders are a good proxy for understanding audiences and what matters to them, targeted external interviews and questionnaire surveys build on that knowledge, and agency experts complement this with their accumulated experience.
Quantitative brand research, though, is a science. Instead of relying more on our experience and intuition, we’re after statistically valid data to inform our choices as we shape the brand to meet audiences where they are and deliver the value that they’re looking for. As with all things data, the quality of the evidence depends on the methods for collecting it.
Enter: the art and science of survey design.
When doing brand research at scale, it’s not enough to just ask good questions. How a survey is structured determines how effectively it will engage audiences and generate reliable evidence. Poorly designed surveys—ones that are too vague, too long, or unintentionally biased—can lead to flawed insights and misinformed decisions. A well-crafted survey provides nonprofits with trustworthy data on audience perceptions, needs, and motivations that are invaluable for understanding brand equity and creating effective brand messaging, design, and experiences.
Again, for most nonprofits working on their brands, I firmly believe that a combination of stakeholder expertise in the sector and issues plus thoughtful, small-scale research is appropriate and effective. For large organizations, membership nonprofits, associations, publishers, some foundations, and others, large-scale surveys designed with scientifically sound best practices can be invaluable to empowering people to make informed decisions about how to shape the brand.
I’ve worked closely with my friend and strategic planning consultant, Professor Ann Murphy, who is an expert in survey design, to shape Constructive’s approach to quantitative survey design. It’s built on 6 steps that ensure organizations ask the right questions, in the right ways, and in the right order to effectively engage audiences and deliver the insights needed to make informed decisions about a nonprofit’s brand.
Step 1. Define Your Nonprofit Brand Survey Strategy
It sounds obvious, but to guarantee that your survey adds value, start by defining your objectives. Without a clear purpose, a survey can become a simple checkbox exercise to satisfy stakeholders rather than a strategic tool that drives informed decision-making. At a high level, here’s what this looks like:
Outline Objectives and Outcomes
Before you write a single survey question, clearly define its higher purpose and what you specifically want to learn from the results. By doing so, you’ll strategically guide every decision, from survey design to analysis, made by the people working on it. For example:
- Are you looking for general brand health feedback or initiative-specific insights?
- How can your survey complement and build upon other research methods?
- What type of data do you want to gather? Are you looking for qualitative feedback, sentiment analysis, or demographic trends?
- How will the survey support and inform your strategy going forward?
Once you’ve established your survey’s purpose and priorities, you can now focus on which audiences you will engage with it.
Identify Core Audiences
To generate valuable survey results, it helps to ask the right people the right questions! This can look like one survey for all audiences, or, depending on your organization’s size, survey segmentation allows you to target different questions to different audiences. Either way, you’ll want to ask yourself:
- Who will participate in the survey and what demographic mix do we need?
- What is their relationship to or familiarity with the brand?
Have they participated in previous surveys, and if so, how can we build on that experience? - What are their motivations? How can you incentivize responses to increase participation?
The more intentional you are about survey audiences, the more relevant the results—which drives higher participant engagement and creates more accurate data.
Consider the Broader Potential
Yes, the primary goal of a brand research survey is to inform how the brand shows up in the world and the experiences it creates for people. It also has the potential for broader application in strategic communications and knowledge mobilization that can benefit a nonprofit’s partners or the field. You’ll be putting a lot of time and effort into your brand survey, and it will generate a lot of information. Are there ways you’d like to use this to benefit more than your brand?
For example, can your research shape a case study or white paper that helps similar organizations understand how they can more effectively engage their audiences? Can it be used to create a research report that can help strengthen the sector your organization works in, bring in new players, or foster cross-sector collaboration such as public-private partnerships? Would sharing results through strategic communications and directly with your audiences deepen understanding and build greater trust and engagement?
You’ll be putting in the time, so plan in advance for how you and others can get the greatest amount of good from it!
Step 2. Draft Questions and Test Your Survey
Much like there is a thorough testing and QA process during website design to make sure that what you’ve created will work as intended, it’s a good idea to make sure that you get initial feedback on your brand survey in a controlled setting so it’s clear and usable to your audience and delivers the results you’re looking for. From the questions you create to a test run of the survey, you’ll want to:
Develop Strategic and Well-Structured Questions
There’s a science to designing effective brand surveys that provide results you can rely on—which, not surprisingly, is determined by the questions you ask. The sum is greater than the whole of its parts, and your combination of questions—and the order in which they are asked—work together to deliver a more complete picture of audience beliefs, perceptions, and preferences.
Quantitative data is structured, numerical, and measurable. It’s collected through closed-ended questions like multiple-choice, Likert scales, or rankings. Qualitative data is generated by open-ended questions and text responses, allowing respondents to share their thoughts in long-form writing or via interviews. And beyond the style of question, most important, is to make sure that your work does not create unintentional bias or skewed results.
To start, there are a few best practices:
- Avoid leading questions that can create bias or suggest the answer you’re hoping for.
- Diversify the question structure to create a rhythm that keeps participants engaged with each question.
- Create a mix of open and close-ended questions to generate quantitative and qualitative data.
There’s a rhythm to taking a survey—how you design yours will dictate how engaged participants remain. There’s no shortage of information on this topic. SurveyMonkey created a helpful guide to survey questions, and Pew Research Center published their best practices for writing survey questions.
Define Survey Length and Structure
If you build it, will they come? Not necessarily. Any time you create a survey, you’re asking people to take time out of their day to give you information. Depending on their relationship with your brand, that may or may not be important to them, so how can you make sure that your audience is willing to participate and properly engage?
According to HubSpot, 47% of consumers say they’re most likely to abandon a survey if it’s taking too long, so prioritize essential questions to respect people’s time and prevent drop-off. Constructive’s best-practice target to maximize engagement is a survey that takes 10-15 minutes to complete. To avoid survey abandonment, you can also consider the following ethical survey design best practices:
- Respect privacy and anonymity (disclose if you’re collecting emails)
- Disclose survey length or time commitment at the beginning
- Include a progress bar or question #s to show progress
- Consider a multi-page design over continuous scrolling
- Only make the essential questions required
Make It Accessible
Designing with accessibility in mind ensures your survey is clear, concise, and usable for all respondents. Beyond applying standard ethical design principles, it’s essential to consider your target audience and their individual needs. This accessible survey design checklist is a helpful starting point:
- Device Compatibility: Is the survey accessible across mobile phones, laptops, tablets, or other device types?
- Format: Is the survey available digitally and in person to accommodate preferences or access to technology?
- Clarity: Is the survey written in a way that is clear and does not intentionally mislead or confuse the respondent?
- Legibility: Is the content easy to understand in your audience’s language and reading level?
Conduct a Pilot Survey
A pilot survey is your opportunity to test your design and make any adjustments. Before launching your survey to your entire audience, start with a representative group of 15-20 respondents. This allows you to gather feedback or implement changes before rolling the survey out to everyone.
When testing your survey with a smaller group, you’ll want to look for patterns in incomplete responses and ask participants to note any confusing or unclear questions. This will help refine your survey and avoid misinterpretations. Based on the pilot survey feedback, you can fine-tune and finalize the survey as needed before the big launch.
Step 3. Distribute & Monitor Your Survey
How you share your survey is just as critical as the survey design itself. How people receive your survey can significantly impact its effectiveness, so having a thoughtful strategy is key to collecting meaningful responses.
Choose Appropriate Distribution Channels
Getting your survey in front of the right audience at the right time requires strategic planning. Some respondents may be easily reachable via mobile or personal devices, while others have limited internet access. Whether print, digital, or a combination, it’s essential to keep your audience in mind when planning your survey rollout. Potential channels include:
- Social media
- SMS
- Website embedding
- Printed material with QR codes
By strategically distributing your survey across the right mix of channels, you can increase audience participation and collect a more representative sample of feedback.
Monitor to Drive Engagement
If you’ve ever received continuous emails from a brand to complete a survey, you know first-hand how vital frequency is for the overall user experience. Monitoring responses will help determine if you want to send reminders or offer different incentives to encourage higher participation. It’s all about balancing timing and frequency—sending too many reminders can alienate your audience, while too few may result in low participation.
Step 4. Clean Data & Analyze Results
Before jumping straight into analysis mode, data cleaning is a must! Cleaning data is a crucial step to ensuring that the results generated by your survey meet your organization’s brand research needs.
Verify Data Integrity
Verifying data integrity includes checking for missing or incomplete data, removing duplicates, and addressing outliers. Assessing the reliability and validity of the data ensures that it accurately represents the audience that completed the survey. These techniques include:
- Factor analyses: Simplifies complex datasets with multiple variables.
- Intraclass Correlation Coefficient: Quantifies the degree of similarity or consistency among observations.
- Cronbach’s Alpha: Assesses how closely related a group of items are as a whole.
Synthesize and Contextualize Findings
Now comes the fun part! After closing the survey and cleaning the data, you can begin analyzing the results. The survey analysis phase will uncover how audiences interact with and perceive your brand now, brand themes to pay close attention to during the strategy phase, and what the results suggest for the future of your brand’s messaging and positioning.
Step 5. Document Your Findings
A survey is only as valuable as the analysis that follows it. Once your results are in, it’s important to present the findings succinctly to inspire ongoing discussions about your nonprofit brand.
Just like you designed your survey with UX in mind, you’ll want to consider your audience when deciding how to best present the results. Maybe your management team would prefer a dynamic slideshow presentation. Maybe they only have time to read a one-page summary. Regardless of format, aim to blend a mix of text-based summary and data visualization to highlight key takeaways succinctly, with the option to dive into more details.
Once you present the objective documentation of the results, a third-party partner can add insights into what the findings may suggest for the brand’s future, what topics to explore more fully, and any actionable recommendations based on the results.
Depending on the degree of rigor that your organization would like for its brand survey—particularly if the results will be communicated externally—it may make sense to perform more sophisticated regression-based analyses that allow the team to examine relationships between variables, like responses by audiences such as grantmakers depending on their size, type, or areas of focus.
Depending on how individual stakeholder research in the broader brand research work answers any open questions that survey results present, your team may also want to conduct a small set of targeted interviews with survey participants to increase understanding of unexpected results.
Step 6. Optimize Future Nonprofit Brand Surveys
Surveys aren’t a one-and-done but should be a regular check-in with your nonprofit community. After your initial survey is sent, you can revisit this process to get updated data from your audience on their experience with your brand and what they’d like to see more of in the future. This continuous feedback loop helps you stay in touch with your audience’s needs and can adapt your brand strategies accordingly.
To Wrap Up
Whether it’s brand research or UX research for your website, investing time into designing a thoughtful, targeted survey and relying on scientifically proven methods that generate reliable results, you can better understand your nonprofit’s audiences and what’s important to them, deliver greater value that strengthens relationships, and ultimately create a greater impact in support of your mission.
The value of a survey goes beyond the results themselves; it’s also about creating an ongoing dialogue with your audience. With careful planning, your survey will not only provide answers to short-term questions but also unlock opportunities for long-term success.
Ready to strengthen your organization’s brand strategy? We’re here to help!
