Surveys are a very common method of engaging consumers, residents and citizens. So common in fact, that sometimes people can become fatigued with the process – diminishing input or causing them to give up entirely. The following article discusses what survey fatigue is, how to recognise it and how to combat it.
What is survey fatigue?
Survey fatigue can be a big problem for anyone trying to facilitate an engagement activity. Whether that’s a public body trying to run a statutory consultation, a local council wanting to know how residents feel about a specific project, or a community organisation seeking input from users to shape future services.
Survey fatigue is exactly what it sounds like: It is when, instead of being engaged with the activity, citizens are becoming disinterested, disengaged or disaffected with the process.
This fatigue has many potential causes and can take different forms, but generally speaking the results are the same:
- Low survey response rates.
- Poorer quality responses.
- Unrepresentative responder demographics.
Surveys are far from the only way to engage citizens in the decisions that affect their lives. However, they are an important tool in any facilitator’s arsenal. A large percentage of consultations and community engagement activities involve surveys in some shape or form, so any issue with recruiting participants or getting high-quality feedback, that has the potential to become a serious problem.
Types of survey fatigue
There are numerous reasons an individual may struggle to engage with a survey. From family commitments to work pressures to a pre-existing perception about the body running the consultation.
In previous articles, we’ve discussed some of the difficulties inherent to citizen engagement, as well as addressed how to prevent accessibility becoming a barrier to entry. However, survey fatigue is quite a specific issue that usually arises in one of four ways:
Too many questions
The first of these issues is the easiest to spot. It is the type of fatigue that happens when a survey simply has too many questions. An engaged citizen may be willing to dedicate a certain amount of time to a survey on a topic they care about, like a local plan they feel passionate about, but what about one that isn’t already engaged? What about those who are affected significantly by the subject of the survey, but haven’t got the luxury of a lot of spare time? The task for those designing a survey is to figure out exactly how much information they can gather without the length of the survey becoming a problem in itself.
Asking the same questions repeatedly
Thoroughness is important in a survey, particularly if the survey is going to be used for something that affects the public, like designing new common spaces or improving public safety. However, sometimes facilitators fall into the trap of asking essentially the same question again and again in slightly different ways.
While a participant may have patience with a little repetition, if it becomes excessive it can become a reason they disengage from the process.
They’ve been asked about this topic before
Following up on previous surveys is always a good idea. However, sometimes participants can find themselves being asked about only one topic or subject area again and again. However engaged they may be with a topic, it is rare for anyone to enjoy rehashing the same thing over and over.
It can also make participants feel that they hadn’t been heard the first time. For example, if a survey respondent gives a detailed answer on how traffic issues in their area are being caused by the timing of a specific traffic light – they may be impatient if nothing has changed when they are consulted on congestion a year later.
They haven’t seen the impact of their contributions
This is the most complex reason for survey fatigue, and often the hardest to spot for facilitators. Citizens are more likely to develop survey fatigue if they have contributed to previous surveys and have not seen how that contribution mattered.
This may mean they didn’t receive feedback from facilitators on how their response was used, or it may mean that they haven’t seen the impact in their day to day life. For example, if someone has repeatedly filled in a survey about their experience of an NHS service and several years later they are seeing the same problems, they may begin to feel that their contribution isn’t being heard.
Survey fatigue in public engagement
Survey fatigue is a particular problem in public engagement. Whereas a consumer may be happy to fill out a short survey for one of their favourite brands, interactions with government and public bodies are often more fraught.
A company not adopting your suggestion for a better flavour of ice cream is not going to elicit the same emotional response as your local council not listening to you about the quality of your road.
The typical survey response rate in public engagement varies significantly according to topic, area and type. In surveys relating to health and patient care, response rates are often very high, with a 2022 study finding a response rate of over 70%. However, participation in other types of public engagement surveys is often much lower. A result of around 10% is much more typical, but again this depends largely on context.
Beyond the seriousness of the subject matter, surveys conducted by public bodies are prone to survey fatigue because:
- The formality (particularly of surveys conducted due to an existing statutory requirement) can lend itself to unnecessary repetition.
- This can also lead to the use of jargon and lengthy question styles.
- The subject matter sometimes requires a lot of contextual information.
- Public engagement surveys are more likely to require follow-up questions.
Despite being more prone to survey fatigue, it is particularly essential for governments and public bodies to get the balance right. Surveys of this kind can form an essential part of how decisions that affect citizens are made.
How to prevent survey fatigue
Understanding why survey fatigue happens is only the first step. The next is to anticipate where survey fatigue may happen, and ensure surveys are designed in a way to reduce it where possible. When developing an engagement plan that includes a survey, it is important to keep these in mind:
- Write clear questions in plain English
One of the most important ways to combat survey fatigue is to make sure that survey questions are clear. That means avoiding overly technical language, jargon and terminology that may exclude a potential survey respondent. Wherever possible, be concise without assuming too much pre-existing knowledge.
- Provide information without overloading
Contextual information is useful. Particularly where a survey is used as part of a wider consultation process, providing additional information and supporting documents can help fill in the gaps for a lay audience and provide clarity where questions may otherwise be ambiguous.
However, sometimes facilitators fall into the trap of providing an information overload. A clear explanation and a few short supporting documents may be helpful, but a hundred long PDFs of information that is only tangentially related will put many potential participants off engaging entirely. This is particularly common when public bodies consult on things like local plans, or Local Nature Recovery Strategies, where a given issue affects a large area in a number of ways. When providing information, ensure it is both necessary and clear.
- Avoid repetition! Avoid repetition!
Asking repetitive questions, even from different angles can sometimes produce interesting results. It is common in academic research to do this, in order to test if respondents are being guided by specific framing. For example, does a citizen change their view of their area when asked about their “street” versus their “neigbhourhood”. Would someone be happier with more community policing than they are with anti-social behaviour measures?
As interesting as this can be – and sometimes necessary – it can cause survey fatigue. Where possible, avoid repetition. Sometimes facilitators don’t even realise they are essentially asking the same thing repeatedly, so make sure to test a given survey for repetition before rolling out more widely.
- Skip-logic and conditional formatting
It is rare for a long survey to require every respondent to answer every question. Instead of forcing respondents to repeatedly enter “N/A” or similar, make good use of conditional formatting and skip logic. One of the many advantages of digital engagement platforms is that it allows respondents to be presented with only the parts of a survey that are relevant to them and avoids questions fatigue.
For example, someone filling in an online survey may select that they are an adult without children, and therefore wouldn’t be asked about local childcare provision. It’s worth noting that shorter surveys can be just as informative as longer surveys.
- Follow up, don’t rehash
Follow-up surveys can be a way of demonstrating that the contributions of respondents were valued. However, if the follow-up survey contains essentially the same information and questions, it can leave respondents feeling that they were not listened to the first time.
Again, there are sometimes good reasons to ask the same questions. If you’re tracking the effect changes made due to the first survey, then it follows that you will need to ask people similar questions and see if there has been a change. However, in this case it is important to make it clear to respondents that they are being asked the same questions because changes were made, not because they weren’t.
- Show the value of their contribution
Most importantly, demonstrating the value of survey contributions can have a remarkable impact on a respondent’s willingness to follow it through. A long, complex survey alone may trigger a lower response rate. A survey that makes clear how responses will be used to inform real world decision-making and a timeline for those decisions will generate a great deal more buy-in.
This is particularly important if this is a repeat survey, or one where multiple participation sessions are expected. Showing the impact previous survey input had on local decision-making can make a big difference.
Citizen Space is the go-to govtech platform for engaging with citizens, managing large scale government consultations and simplifying statutory processes. If you’d like to learn more about how our software can be used to avoid survey fatigue, book a free demo today.
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