In part one of our series, we talked about unintentional mobile participants in online surveys and shared how SimpsonScarborough is thinking about the rise of mobile usage in survey participation. Unintentional mobile users, those who choose to take our designed-for-the-web survey using some kind of web-enabled mobile device, have increased dramatically in the past few years. In particular, prospective undergraduate students frequently use mobile phones for survey participation, with less than half taking an online survey using a desktop or laptop computer. But what about other important constituents such as internal audiences? We took a closer look at recent surveys done with some of your most valuable audiences: alumni, faculty/staff, and current students.
You can see in the chart above that unintentional mobile users are the minority with internal audiences. For example, only about one in four current students take our online surveys using a mobile device. While this number is much lower than the more than 50% of prospective undergrads who use a mobile device to complete an online survey, this is still a decent number of unintentional mobile participants. And it is a group that we cannot afford to ignore.
Even though the unintentional mobile respondent numbers are smaller among internal audiences, we still have to make sure that we have the same internal conversations and ask ourselves the same questions that we ask when designing a prospective student instrument. As we discussed last month, survey length is the primary concern for the unintentional mobile respondent, and we have to be extremely conscientious of survey length for mobile users. With internal audiences, there is a little more leniency with survey length (I mean a little!). By definition, these audiences are more engaged with the school and are willing to dedicate more time to a survey. That, along with the lower percentage of mobile respondents, allows us to get away with a slightly longer instrument without impacting quality. But as mobile participants continue to increase, that reprieve might be short-lived.
It is interesting to note that as with prospective undergraduate students, the majority of current students and alumni taking surveys using a mobile device are doing so on a phone rather than a tablet. What does this mean for surveys? In addition to survey length, we also have to carefully consider question design and screen size to ensure not to negatively impact question functionality and response burden.
Check back with us next month for the final installment in the series, when we look a little closer into the differences in survey response among unintentional mobile respondents for prospective undergraduate student audiences.
