A good survey starts long before the first question is written. This guide follows a fictional example, a Tauranga sports club planning next season, through each step in Mailpro. The same process works for a customer satisfaction survey, a post-event questionnaire or a staff pulse check. For an overview of features, see online surveys in New Zealand.
1. Decide what you need to learn
Write down the decision the survey will inform. The club needs to decide whether to add a weeknight junior session and whether to change subscription fees. Every question should help with one of those decisions; anything else is “nice to know” and can be dropped.
2. Draft short, neutral questions
- Ask one thing per question. “How satisfied are you with coaching and facilities?” is two questions.
- Avoid leading wording such as “How much did you enjoy our great new clubrooms?”.
- Use rating fields for satisfaction and importance, and one or two open questions for comments.
- For demographic questions, allow multiple answers where people may belong to several groups, such as ethnicity, and add “prefer not to say”.
- Use plain NZ English, and check any te reo Māori with a fluent speaker.
3. Build the survey in Mailpro
- Log in, open the survey area and create a new survey.
- Add your questions and answer options, and mark the essential ones as required.
- Apply your logo and colours using the design settings.
- Add branching logic so only parents of junior players see the junior-session questions.
- Add a progress bar so people know how far they have to go.
4. Handle privacy up front
Start the survey with two or three sentences: why you are asking, how the answers will be used, whether responses are anonymous, and how long it takes. This meets the Privacy Act 2020’s expectation that people know why information is being collected (IPP 3). Collect only what you need (IPP 1). If you promise anonymity, do not ask for names or email addresses. For sensitive topics, consider password protection.
5. Test it
Ask two or three people to complete the survey on their phones and tell you where they got stuck. Fix confusing wording and check that branching sends people to the right questions.
6. Send it at the right time
The club sends its survey by email to members who have agreed to receive club communications, in the weeks after prize-giving and well before the Christmas break. A weekday evening in NZ time works well for members who work during the day. Include your club’s details and an unsubscribe link, as the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 requires for commercial messages. See sending a survey by email. Send one reminder a few days later to those who have not responded, and close the survey on a stated date.
7. Read the results and act
Open survey statistics to see charts for each question, then read the open comments in full. Share a short summary with respondents, including what you will change as a result. People are more willing to answer the next survey when they can see the last one made a difference. Keep raw responses only as long as you need them, and remember that Mailpro stores them in Switzerland on private infrastructure, outside US jurisdiction.