We ran a survey earlier this summer – “Your Top 3." Our goal was to get a clearer picture of how important each of ten services is to our patrons.  We listed each of the services on the survey sheet and asked patrons to pick their top three.  We added a final optional question: "What is the one thing the library needs to get right?"

We ran the survey online using SurveyMonkey, had paper survey slips at the checkout desk and on tables around the library, and put the questions on sets of business cards (more about that later).  We entered responses from all sources into SurveyMonkey and used that to correlate results. 

We billed this as a 10-second survey (“Build a better library in 10 seconds”).  Most patrons were happy to fill out the survey while we were checking out their materials.  This had the best response rate of any survey we’ve done, in part because we didn’t call it a survey and because we made it very quick and easy.

I’ve attached the list of survey questions and results as a PDF file, and a copy of the answers to “What is the one thing the library needs to get right?” question as an Excel file. 

We made sets of business cards to use as a more entertaining way to get groups of people (forums, teen clubs, etc.) to take the survey.  Each set of cards had a survey question on one side and a number (1-10) on the other.  We asked each person to arrange the cards in a row in order of preference – the left end being the most important service and the right end the least important.  When each person had arranged her cards, she was done. (This pleased everyone who had already been here a while for the public forum.) Library staff then turned over all the cards in place and recorded the number on the back of each on a chart.  The ten chart columns were labeled A-J, where A corresponded to the service that was selected as the most important and J the least important, and the rows were numbered 1-50.  Then we entered this data into Excel for further crunching.  The top three picks from each survey card respondent were manually entered into SurveyMonkey.

Hope this helps! 
Teresa Stannard, Library Director

Parchment Community Library
401 S Riverview Dr.
Parchment, MI  49004

Ph. 269.343.7747 x203
Fax 269.343.7749

Library Hours:  M-Th 10-8; F 10-6; Sat 10-4
On 12/5/2015 9:24 AM, Helena Hayes wrote:
Good Saturday morning!

Have you done a successful user survey? If so, would you be willing to share your questions (or the entire survey)?

You can reply on or off list for this one... I'm guessing there might be broad interest.

Thanks in advance!

Helena