The rising importance and data security awareness are some of the factors that can affect your survey response rates. Understandably, your respondents might have some concerns, especially if the topic is sensitive and they share personal information with you.
Internet users want to be sure their data is secure, and they are more likely to answer the survey if they feel confident it will remain private. To increase your survey response rates, ensure your respondents know their data will be kept safe, and try to be as transparent as possible about your data policies.
It is always good practice to be transparent with your respondents, letting them know about your privacy policies and sharing how you plan to use collected data before they start the survey.
You can do this in several ways, for example, by linking your privacy policy in the survey's Welcome message at the beginning, a brief explanation in the email invitation, or a Contact form with a Consent checkbox or a Disclaimer.
See below to learn how to implement the above suggestions in your survey.
Welcome message
Start your survey by including the information you want to share with the respondents to put them at ease regarding the security measures you're implementing.
You can also hyperlink a part of the text by highlighting it and clicking on the 🔗 icon:
Contact form with a Consent checkbox and a Disclaimer
You can hyperlink a part of the Contact form's Introduction or text to let your respondents visit a page with your Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, or any other document:
In the Settings tab of this question, you can enable a Disclaimer or/and a Consent checkbox:
💡 If you add a Consent checkbox to your Contact form, the question will be impossible to skip, meaning everyone who'd like to proceed with the survey must accept the conditions (consent).
You can make the fields in this question type mandatory as well:
Email invitation
Include information about the steps you're taking to protect the respondent's data in the email where you send the survey:
Conclusion
Data security is an increasingly important issue affecting survey response rates. Make sure you are transparent about your data security policies and use appropriate measures to protect respondents’ data privacy. This can help increase the number of responses and make the survey process smoother.
Survicate is GDPR compliant. For more details about Survicate and GDPR, click here.