Just prior to the Child Protection Conference that we were involved with in June we put together a survey for participants and others with experience of the Child Protection to complete. We had high hopes for it.
This post is an update on how it went with the survey.
It did not go well. Sadly, we have agreed to abandon our survey for the time being as we had a mere 25 responses and a host of irritated messages.
It seems that our enthusiasm was not matched by our design and technical skills, and we probably ought to have given this more thought before we launched the survey rather than being led by the deadline of the conference.
We think, with hindsight, that the survey was over-ambitious in terms of its breadth, and it therefore became complicated for example because not everyone was able to answer all the questions. More importantly though, the google forms layout did not work well, and many people reported difficulty in submitting the survey because google thought they had completed something incorrectly or had missed something out. We think this was really down to our lack of familiarity with google forms, and our failure to get it set up quite right before we launched.
We’re really sorry this particular piece of work hasn’t worked out as we hoped, but we’ve resolved to use it as a learning experience. Next time we will take more time to prepare focused and manageable questions, to tailor a response form that suits the needs of the survey in question, and to test it before launch.
Onwards and upwards!