Many communities have administered a business owner written survey and most are more than happy to share their methods and results. There is little advantage in trying to design your business owner written survey from scratch. If your community is like most, you will lack volunteers with significant survey design experience. It is easy to make costly mistakes. If a question is poorly worded, it will yield less useful or even incorrect information. If your community has administered a business owner written survey in the past, consider using some of the same questions in order to see if answers, and thus businesses, have changed over time.

For answers to be useful, questions must be unambiguous and should not lead the business owner to a particular response. Asking about existing behavior is the best way to predict future behavior. For easier analysis and interpretation, to the extent possible ask multiple choice rather than open-ended questions. Match questions on demographics with census categories so they can be compared. Even subtle differences in the wording of similar questions will prevent comparisons. This advice is not meant to discourage you from administering your own business owner written survey, but we do encourage you to be cautious when writing questions.

The Standardized Business Owner Written Survey (in Appendix 1) includes questions that Wisconsin Main Street Program staff consider important in a comprehensive downtown market analysis and useful for business retention, expansion and recruitment. You are free to eliminate questions that are not important to your efforts. Keep in mind that each question you use as designed will allow you to compare answers from with other communities that used the same question. This cross-community comparison will enhance the power of your survey. You should not modify the wording of a question without good reason. If you believe questions should be modified, please contact the Wisconsin Main Street Program so we can consider revising the standardized survey.

When reviewing standardized questions for inclusion or omission from your survey, remember that you will want to pair some with questions from your consumer survey. The paired questions allow for comparisons between the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of business owners and their potential customers.

Always customize any borrowed survey questions to fit your unique local needs. The Standardized Business Owner Written Survey provided includes questions you can personalize. We also provide instructions for personalization   in Appendix

An introduction is an important part of any type of survey. For written and web-based surveys, the introduction is usually included in a cover letter. For telephone surveys, business visitations and focus groups, the introduction will be presented verbally. The introduction should explain how the survey results will help the owner’s business. It should also include instructions and an estimate of the amount of time required to take it, state that  only aggregate data will be made public, and ask for participation.

It is always good practice to proofread and pretest your survey, including your cover letter, before full distribution. Sometimes volunteers drafting the customized questions get too close to their work and fail to see the obvious. Have a few business owners who are active volunteers in your organization, but who have not been involved in survey design, take your business owner written survey and give you feedback. Instructions and questions that are unclear and misinterpreted will show up in a pretest and can be corrected. Use the pretest to estimate the time required to take the survey.

Eventually, editing must come to an end. Because distribution and collection require a significant commitment of volunteer time and energy, it is important to have the organization or committee overseeing the project formally approve the final version of your business owner written survey.

To establish your organization and community as business friendly, as well as aid in business retention, you should aim for a 100 percent response rate for your business owner written survey. You can achieve this level of response only by hand delivering surveys to every business owner and personally explaining the importance of their participation. Your resources will determine how you accomplish hand delivering the surveys. You may need to use volunteers; if so, it’s a good idea to recruit them from owners of businesses or buildings and name some of them “block captains.” Block captains take responsibility for distributing and collecting the surveys to others on their block. (Once recruited, you can also ask block captains to distribute other information, as needed, to businesses on their block.)

To stay on task, you must set deadlines for delivery and collection of your business owner written survey and assign specific responsibilities. We also suggest you mail a letter ahead of time announcing future delivery of the survey. In addition, we recommend announcing survey plans in your organization’s newsletter and press releases. Business owners will be much more likely to participate if they understand the project and why it will help their business. Finally, it is important to train the staff or volunteers who will be delivering and collecting the survey.

The number of businesses you plan to survey will affect your printing decisions. Photocopying surveys is more cost effective for low volumes, while professional printing is more cost effective for high volumes. If photocopying, make sure the quality of the copy is good. Stray marks that sometimes show up on poor copies could affect the accuracy of computerized optical mark recognition software.

The printed surveys from Step 9 need to be hand delivered to every business owner. Although the cover letter explains how the survey will help the owner’s business, provides instructions and asks for participation, volunteers should repeat the same messages at the time of delivery. Give business owners an estimate of the amount of time required to complete the survey and when to expect a return visit for collection.

Again, your goal is a 100 percent response rate and that can only be accomplished face to face. If a business owner has not completed his or her survey by the deadline, the individual collecting surveys should schedule a new return visit with the business owner. (Obviously, this also requires building late returns into your schedule). You could also switch techniques at this point and conduct business visitations to survey business owners slow in returning the surveys.

Enter data into a spreadsheet or database program. The Wisconsin Main Street Program’s Standardized Business Owner Written Survey is scannable for automatic data entry.

While most computerized optical mark recognition software is surprisingly accurate, there are always answers that will be unrecognized or incorrectly recorded. In addition, most programs are still unable to automatically recognize handwriting and open-ended responses. For these reasons it is necessary for someone, preferably a volunteer, to verify and correct any errors in scanned answers, as well as type hand-written open-ended answers. You will also need to transfer information to the business portion of the downtown inventory—including owner contact information, business classification, primary products and services, date established, business hours, space use, and employment information.

The simplest way to summarize survey results is to report the frequency of each response to each question.

With frequencies in hand, look for patterns in the results that would be useful for your downtown business owners to know. Also, make note of “red flags” that might warn of the need for business assistance. Finally, take care to protect the confidentiality of the information collected.

Invest your human and financial resources in quality editing, rather than expensive printing.

Remember to share the results of your survey with your business owners. Mail or hand delivers the summary report to them. Sharing this information is a valuable business retention activity. The report will demonstrate the importance of the time they spent filling out the survey, as well as how they might personally benefit from the results.

Your organization should plan to survey business owners on a regular basis, ideally every year, but at least every other year. For questions where the answer is unlikely to be different from the last time you surveyed, include owners’ former answers and allow them to change it if necessary. Use the exact wording for as many questions as possible in order to see if answers, and thus businesses, have changed over time.