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Using Incentives to Increase the Number of Survey Respondents

Incentives may help increase your survey response rate. Knowing your target respondents may help determine whether you offer an incentive and what type you provide. Incentives may help generate responses from people who otherwise are not likely to engage, and they also may yield a more representative sample and increase goodwill.

Incentives

There is no perfect value or dollar amount for an incentive. To help determine what kind and value of incentive to offer, consider budget, target population for the survey, and when and how the incentive is given.

Incentives can be monetary or non-monetary. Cash awards increase response rates the most. As expected, the more money or the nicer the non-monetary gift, the higher the response rate. However, there is a point when increasing the incentives does not help generate submissions. In addition, a high-value incentive could be misconstrued as a bribe. A low-value incentive may not be worth the time that completing the survey would take, however.

Non-monetary incentives, while not as effective as monetary awards, should appeal to your target population.

All survey respondents could be given a small incentive, or a large incentive could be given randomly to one or a few of them. A small incentive could be five percent-off admission to the organization’s upcoming conference; a large incentive could be free admission to the conference. A large incentive to a small number of survey respondents could boost survey rates, as people want to win, and it may be easier to provide a large incentive, or a few large incentives, than many small ones.

Potential Concerns

Giving an incentive via e-mail or mail is problematic because some people (who might want the award) might not complete the survey due to personal questions they’d need to answer, such as “What is your e-mail address?” Thus, the survey administrator should require responses that are not linked to personal details.

There are possible drawbacks to incentives. They might capture the wrong population or group of respondents because of the award being offered. People could just fill out the required questions (not many others) to try to get an incentive. Some people, who are known as “satisficers,” complete surveys quickly for a prize and misrepresent themselves to take more surveys. In addition, incentives that every survey respondent receives could result in bots, programs that can compromise survey results.

A survey may not need an incentive, of course. Some people may be motivated to respond without a potential award, making an incentive a waste of money. If your organization already has a high survey response rate, an incentive may not be necessary.

Final Thoughts

Be careful with incentives. An incentive could help increase survey responses but does not always help. Sometimes, it can even have detrimental effects.


Miriam Edelman, MPA, MSSW, is a Washington, D.C.-based policy professional. Her experience includes policy work for Congress. Miriam’s undergraduate degree is from Barnard College, Columbia University, with majors in political science and urban studies. She has a master’s in public administration from Cornell University, where she was inducted into the national honorary society for public administration. She has a master’s of science in social work (focusing on policy) from Columbia University. She is a commissioner of the DC Commission on Persons with Disabilities. Miriam aims to continue her career in public service. She is especially interested in democracy, civic education, District of Columbia autonomy, diversity, health policy, women’s issues, and disabilities.

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