Surveys Vs Polls
From customer experience surveys to friend’s social media polls these days it seems everyone wants your opinions. But what is the difference between a poll and a survey?
[As an aside, neither one is crowdsourcing which is another approach to collecting perceptions with MANY limitations…we will address in a different blog post]Let’s start with the similarities:
First – and in general – surveys and polls capture or gather people’s opinions about a subject or experience. This can range from opinions about a product or service to beliefs about socio-cultural issues or intentions toward a certain behavior. No matter the topic, surveys and polls share the goal of gathering information like feedback and opinions from a particular group of people.
Second, surveys and polls often rely on closed-ended questions – meaning they ask questions and provide a scale or set of options to select from; “On a scale of “strongly satisfied” to “strongly dissatisfied” how would you rate your experience?” And “On a scale of “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree,” how much do you agree with the following statements?”
Third, surveys and polls can be conducted in a variety of shared ways such as by phone, mail, and the internet, but also on street corners or in malls. Have you ever been stopped by someone standing outside of a grocery store or on your way out of an event that asks you about your experience? Those quick questionnaires are examples of the kind of quick information that can be gathered in surveys and polls.
So, how do we tell the difference between these two tools?
1) Look at the length of the questionnaire AND the depth of the questions asked. Generally, surveys are multi-variable questionnaires that help you understand your target audiences while polls focus on just one question (maybe two) to get a snapshot of your audience’s opinion on a given subject. For example, let’s say your organization is working on improving its community communication – a survey would ask multiple questions that address multiple variables or factors related to your organization’s community communication, like knowledge about the organization, the channels of communication people use to gather information about the organization, and perceptions about the quality and quantity of the information given in the organization’s community communications. A poll, however, would be one or two quick questions that ask about one variable and capture just a snapshot of the topic. For example, your organization might poll its community members about a recent message – something like, “Have you seen this message?” and “On which channel or platform did you see it?” The big differences here are the quantity and depth of questions.
2) Surveys and polls both generally rely on close-ended questions, but they differ in the types of questions asked. For example, polls usually rely on single-choice, multiple-choice, or open-ended text questions, while surveys use a range of question types such as multiple-choice, ratings, matrix, ranking questions, and more.
3) Surveys and polls differ in their overall purpose and intended use. Polls are generally used to make a simple and quick decision as they consume less time and resources. Surveys are used when you need to make a detailed analysis of the responses gathered. This relates to the depth of data and information gathered, but this also speaks to the purpose of the data and why it’s being gathered – do you need quick, surface-level data to make a decision, or do you need more capture various dimensions of feedback and multi-layered data to inform your decision? The type of information you need drives which tool you use.
To summarize:
Surveys and polls can look a lot alike as they commonly ask for people’s opinions and experiences, they rely heavily on quick short-answer or closed-ended questions, and we often find them in the same places or on the same channels, like online or via calls or text messages. However, their differences lie in their length, depth of questions, and overall purpose. Remember that polls are short, surface-level assessments that get a snapshot of people’s opinions or experiences, while surveys are longer, more in-depth assessments that ask about multiple variables and dimensions of a topic. Importantly, both of these types of tools can help you gather much-needed data to inform progress, change, and/or make decisions.
