Training a Council to design good practice questionnaires and visualise the results effectively

by | Dec 10, 2019 | Case Study | 0 comments

Really knowledgeable and delivered a great session that will help us improve our questionnaire design and data viz.
Rachel Johnson

North Lincolnshire Council

Situation:

North Lincs Council are establishing a Residents’ Panel.  The panel once established will hopefully be made up of 1500+ local residents and they will push out surveys and questionnaires on a fairly frequent basis thereafter.  They will be promoting locally and aim to recruit as many local people as possible. They anticipate administering the Panel in-house.  Topics for surveys will come from a range of sources and will in the main be quantitative in style, although they anticipate some free text questions that will require analysis too.

Task:

  • Train the Panel Team in best practice questionnaire design to enable them to design effective quantitative surveys to collect Resident opinion on a range of topics.
  • Teach the Panel Team good practice data visualisation techniques to enable them to interpret the survey responses for report write up.

Actions:

  • Delivered theory on good practice survey design including planning, questionnaire design as well as audience engagement.
  • Combined theory about visual perception with practical examples of data visualisation design.
  • Utilised test surveys to practice questionnaire design, data visualisation and analysis techniques.
  • Demonstrated story telling techniques which focus audience attention to key visual insights.
  • Engaged the course delegates through fun, interactive quizzes to consolidate learning.

Results:

  • 15 delegates were trained on questionnaire design and data visualisation techniques to enable them to write Residents’ Panel survey reports.
  • No aspects of the quality of delivery of the course were rated below 3, where 4 is the highest score.
  • Most people could apply what they learnt at work, with a wide range of uses for survey design and data analysis.
  • Generated some good follow up ideas for maximising value of the Residents’ Panel surveys.

Workshop Evaluation:

14 of the delegates kindly evaluated the quality of the delivery of the workshop.  The results are shown in a data visualisation, which applies some of the key learning from the course.  This includes for example:

  • ‘Big ass numbers’ to inform context
  • Elimination of visual clutter
  • Consistent use of colour to focus audience attention
  • Employing appropriate chart design techniques
  • Storytelling through text annotation to deliver insight.