Salary & benefits surveys simplified.
Step 1: Know where you want your survey to go.
Who will be reviewing and using the final report?
Your survey participants aren’t always the same individuals who will view and leverage the final salary and benefits report. Often, executives or a board of directors may ultimately use the document more than those who entered the data into the system. Think of it this way:
- Design your survey to answer the big, complex questions your executives and board are asking.
- Develop the actual survey tool to make collecting and entering the data as simple as possible.
Write concise, easy-to-understand questions.
You’ll receive more accurate data and more responses when you invest the time in thoughtfully asking and structuring your questions.
- Offer a glossary of terms and make it easy for users to find and download.
- Spell out acronyms when first used (e.g., Flexible Spending Account, High Deductible Health Plan).
- Answer questions by email, phone and chat.
Understand the importance of job position matching.
Your final report will have outstanding data if your survey has clear job positions with well-written responsibilities. When participants fill out the survey, they will match their staff against your list of available positions.
Job position matching becomes even more important when you’re comparing multiple years of data. The best surveys are consistent with how they structure their job families and positions, as too many changes can skew their data and hurt year-over-year analysis.
Secure the survey’s data.
The data collected contains extremely sensitive information – how much employees make at a specific organization, what benefits they offer, and more.
One way to ensure the final report honors the confidentiality of the organizations who participated is to use aggregated data.
When there aren’t enough responses to mask the identity of the organizations even with aggregated data, the final report should only use the limited responses to answer questions with large sample sizes.
Participating nonprofits are generously donating their time and data to help the sector improve and to offer comparable, fair salaries. Put strict standards in place to ensure your data stays safe and protected.
Step 2: Launch the survey and capture your audience’s attention.
Promote your survey through many channels.
When your survey launches, sending only an email to your list isn’t enough. Consider creative ways to engage your audience:
- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram messages, tailored to each network.
- Video promoting the benefits of the survey and why it exists.
- Phone calls to specific organizations.
- Newsletter-specific content on the survey.
Ultimately, using a variety of ways to get in front of your target audience will capture their attention and encourage their organization to participate.
The survey’s participants need unique messaging.
Executives and HR professionals – especially in the nonprofit sector – are constantly juggling priorities. Tasked with achieving a mission to better their community, they need to find and retain the best employees at a comparable rate to reach their organization’s goal.
The data your survey will provide helps them achieve their ultimate goal, but entering the data can be a significant time investment that’s delegated to other staff.
Those who will be entering the survey data may care more about how the survey operates than why the survey operates.
Measure and monitor the results.
The best salary and benefits surveys are consistently checking and adjusting their communication strategy throughout the time organizations are inputting data.
If your survey’s goals are to reach a specific audience or sector, it’s important to regularly check the data to ensure you’re on target.
A proactive approach to encouraging organizations and incentivizing them to take the survey helps reduce the need to extend the survey’s collection time and increase the quality of the data submitted.
Step 3: Clean the data and publish the reports.
Clean the data to ensure quality.
Typos happen. Your organization’s CEO probably doesn’t make $100,000,000 a year.
While you can add pop-ups and built-in safeguards as users take the survey to catch typos, the best survey consultants have deep industry knowledge to analyze the results and spot previously unseen errors.
When the firm collecting the survey results is putting together their final reports, be sure they are analyzing the data from different perspectives including:
- Percentile rankings (e.g., 25th, 50th, 75th).
- Job families and job positions.
- Years of experience.
Design an easy-to-read report.
Even the best results can be ignored if they aren’t presented well. How you display your data matters as much as how you collected the data. Some of the key calculations to include are:
- Average salary range.
- Minimum and maximum salary.
- Median salary.
- 25th and 75th percentile salary.
Based on the work you did before launching the survey, you have a clear idea of what the final report should look like.
Our experience has helped us learn these common traps to avoid when designing a survey report:
- Using too small of a font size or a hard-to-read font.
- Not alternating the rows’ background colors.
- Jamming too much information on one page.
- Not enough white space.
Be transparent about the report’s methodology.
The more upfront your final report is, the fewer questions and inquiries you’ll receive from the report’s readers. Adding these bits of information to the front of your report will increase the credibility and trust from your readers:
- How the survey was developed
- The date that responses were valid (e.g., January 1)
- How the data was sourced and how long it was collected
- Understanding what survey responses are displayed
