Large Survey Process Step 9

Step 9. What incentives are you offering?

An incentive is something you give respondents in exchange for completing your survey, such as cash or a gift. The use of incentives in a survey may increase response rates and are a good way to express gratitude to the respondents for their time.

Will you be using any incentives for participants (e.g., lottery or engagement token where all survey participants receive an incentive)? If yes, what type?” This is asked is first asked on the Large Survey Request form. After your survey is complete, we will ask you this same question again to see if anything changed from what you initially reported. We periodically review the data you provide about incentives so we can offer you guidance about the benefits of incentives on this web page.

Tips for best practice

If you’re thinking about using gift cards as incentives, Financial Services’ Forest Funds program can help you order gift cards (plastic or digital) and manage the associated logistics, such as participant logs and Workday clearances.

Help us help you!

Think about incorporating an experiment

We often get asked great questions about survey methods: What is the best day for starting a survey? What time of day should I send out reminders? What kinds of advertising works best?

When you conduct a survey experiment, you help us answer your future questions.

After your survey is complete, when we ask you to report your response rate and use of incentives, we will also ask you to report whether you conducted an experiment so we can add to the knowledge we share on these web pages.

There are lots of ways to conduct simple survey experiments. For instance, you could randomly split your sample into two, and send each half different email reminders or incentives. Here is a real example from a survey sent out to undergraduate students:

Two groups (A & B) were formed randomly prior to sending out the survey invitations to all undergraduates. There were 2751 students in Group A invited to take the survey and 2753 students in Group B invited to take the survey. Group A got their invitations at 4pm on Friday, October 22 and Group B at 2pm Monday, October 25. Both groups received the same invitation offering two $150 bookstore gift cards as incentive. There were no reminders. Responses between the two groups were largely similar. Group A had a response rate of 10% while Group B’s response rate was 13%.

If you choose to perform an experiment and are using Qualtrics, you can learn how to combine the two groups’ responses here.

What’s next?

Once you’ve submitted your form, it will be reviewed by a committee made up of representatives from Human Resources; Provost’s Office; General Counsel; Campus Life; and Institutional Research.  The committee will be in touch with you if they have any questions.  Should the committee find the request to be appropriate for the campus community and not conflicting with already approved surveys, it will pass along the request to senior leadership for final approval.

Questions? Contact us at