When conducting online surveys or questionnaires, have you ever consider why the participation rate so low? Could it possibly be because the survey incentive or reward itself is so lame?

If an organization is truly concerned with getting feedback to their survey, then the lottery-style survey reward they offer should immediately be changed.

Before taking your next online survey, figure out your goals. Is management doing this with the hopes of minimal participation to prove or disprove their own theory or objective — or do you really want participation and input?

Most customers will not give up their time to log in to a website and share their information, feedback or opinions to an unknown entity just for the opportunity of being entered into a prize lottery—regardless of the price for a number of reasons, including:

• Not understanding how their personal information is going to be used
• Not trusting the website
• Not knowing how much time a survey will take to complete
• Realizing that their chances of winning the prize are slim to none

On top of these reasons, sometimes a poorly run survey can leave a sour taste on the person taking the survey.

I’ll give you two recent examples of survey incentives that I had participated in that left me with negative feelings toward the company, which were certainly not the original intent of the respective surveys.

The first one was a survey by one of my software companies that came to me as a new window while working in their software. By completing a “short” survey, I had a chance to win a $100 gift card. After answering 5 or 6 questions, I was getting bored and wanted to exit, but it wouldn’t let me out without going to my Task Manager to cancel the entire program that I was working in. Nowhere did it tell me up-front how many questions were going to be asked, how long the survey was going to take to complete or how I was progressing – or giving me an easy escape button. Poorly done, at best.

The second one was from my credit card company. They asked me a series of 15 personal financial questions in return for a chance to win some money – if I qualified. Then, at the end of completing this 12-minute survey, it immediately took me to a screen telling me that I did not qualify for the prize because I was not the right type of account for them. Egregiously poor, at best. I felt so used and frustrated that I have since switched to a different credit card company for my business use.

What is the best way to run a survey? Make everybody a winner. That’s right, for taking the time to answer a questionnaire, the person should be given a survey reward. If it is an online survey, there are many gifts that can rewarded online, such as music and ring tone downloads, restaurant coupons, free movie tickets and even some merchandise rewards. These gifts can rewarded by issuing a discount code that the person can redeem at a site, like DownloadIncentives.com or other similar companies.

If you still want to offer a big prize, you can set up the program so that the participating person is an automatic winner of one of the smaller prizes and then entered into a chance to win a larger ticket item in addition.

Why should a person spend time filling out questionnaire that will benefit your company and not be rewarded for their time? If everybody is a winner, your participation rate will increase, and the quality of your survey results will be more meaningful, as you open up the participating audience.

You can add immediacy to the program and work with a set cost by allowing only the first 500 or 1,000 respondents to participate. As an added benefit, this will get your answers to you more quickly, while limiting your survey budget to a fixed dollar amount.

Try the “everyone is a winner” strategy for your next survey. Measure the results, then decide for yourself. Based on over 25 years in the incentive business, I can assure you that the rest of your surveys will follow this new approach.