Just this past week I spoke with a person who is on staff with the Communication department of a major Christian college.  The Communication department evidently had developed a survey, seeking input for the future direction and offerings of the department.  Their survey had been developed in a traditional paper format for mass-mailing.  Although I do not know the the specifics of this project, let's do a little cost-accounting analysis using approximate expenditures:

• Staff Development:  25 hours at $20/hour = $500
• Printing & Stuffing of 5,000 Surveys: $1,200
• Addressing & Mailing:$1,600
• Pre-Paid Return Postage: $1,100
• Manual Data Entry into a Custom Database/Report Generator: $600

                                                         Total Cost: $5,000

Survey's delivered through the mail tend to have an approximate return rate of 3% and may take a month or longer to recover data.  This means that the college can expect to receive at best 150 returned surveys.  This is a per-unit cost of $33.33.  An additional complication is that people over the age of forty tend to be the one's most likely to return a paper survey in the mail.  If the goal of this survey was to generate future direction for the Communication department, then a survey should have been created and distributed that would target adults under the age of 35.

In short, this is an antiquated and expensive method for polling a membership base.

Could your church benefit from an easy and effective way of polling your membership base?  (And, by the way, the survey methodology is extremely cheap).  Use an online survey.  For less than 1% of the investment made by the college in the example above, your ministry can create unlimited surveys.  What is more, you can create your survey in minutes and have instant feedback from the present and emerging generations within your ministry membership base.

As an example, I have created a FREE (free for me and free for you...how cheap do you want!!!) survey using SurveyMonkey.  Please take a moment to complete the ten question survey.  I hope to post the results in next month's newsletter.


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