Survey communication guide and templates

Good communication is crucial for successful surveys. You need to make the target audience aware of the survey's existence, understand the logistics, and be convinced it's worth responding. Importantly, people must understand why you're running the survey and what you're going to do based on the results. Communication failures often manifest as low response rates which yields you less representative data.

Here's our recommended messaging sequence along with some templates you can modify to suit your needs.

📣 Before the survey

Pre-informing team leads

Team leads play an important role in encouraging their teams to respond and make sense of the survey results. That’s why we recommend engaging them separately throughout the journey.

To team leads:

Heads up!

We’ll run a developer experience survey with Swarmia on [dates]. It will give us a better picture of how we’re doing across the organization and where we can improve. As a manager, you should find this data particularly useful for guiding discussions, improving ways of working, and increasing team engagement.

The survey will influence our engineering priorities, so it’s important for us to get a representative sample. I’d appreciate your help in getting everyone on your team to respond.

👀 Please do this now: Check that your team’s information in Swarmia is up-to-date: app.swarmia.com/settings/teams

Introducing the survey to engineers

People often miss individual messages, so we recommend using multiple channels to inform them about the survey. One good place for this would be an engineering all-hands meeting. Communicating before the survey is open can help you explain its importance and build a bit of anticipation.

To everyone:

🤠 Hi all,

As you know, developer experience is a big priority for us. We want to understand what’s causing you friction and where we can improve. Thus, we’re running an engineering survey with Swarmia on [dates] to gather your feedback.

I want to highlight that we’re not collecting data just for the sake of it, but we’ll take action based on the results, both in teams and at the company level. I’m asking everyone to take a few minutes to respond so we can find out what’s working, what’s not, and where you’d like to see improvements.

I’ll send you more detailed instructions once the survey is live.

🗳️ During the survey

Announcing the survey

We recommend explaining at least the following when announcing the survey:

• why are you running the survey

• how to respond

• who will see the responses

• what will you do after the survey closes

When you launch your survey in Swarmia, we automatically generate a message template with all the necessary details filled in.

Automatic reminders

Swarmia notifies people on Slack 1 hour after you launch the survey. People who haven't responded will be reminded 7, 3, and 1 day before the survey closes.

Reminding team leads to activate their teams

While Swarmia automatically sends reminders to people, there’s a chance some people don’t notice them for one reason or another. Reminding people personally can make them feel more accountable.

You can see the detailed participation in each team by clicking the participation cell in the survey listing. This can serve as a conversation starter.

To team leads:

Hi again,

Our survey is well underway, but we need more responses to hit our target of 90%. Teams [teams with the highest participation] are setting an example for others. I need your help getting everyone to respond.

⏳ Please do this now: Check your team’s participation and remind people to take the survey. You can see the live numbers with the daily Slack digest: app.swarmia.com/settings/team/notifications

📊 After the survey

Informing team leads about the follow-up

Team leads play an important role in ensuring their teams take action based on the survey results.

To team leads:

Thank you!

The survey has now closed, and I appreciate your support in making it happen. Remember to thank people in your team for responding.

The work is not over yet. Next, we'll review the results and take action. Each team is responsible for addressing their specific improvement needs, while we'll address wider issues at the company level.

📅 Please do this now: Schedule a one-hour retrospective to define your team’s focus areas and action points. Post notes from the meeting to [where to post the notes]. You can find instructions here: swarmia.com/blog/developer-survey-retrospectives

Announcing the results

You, the survey creator, and all Swarmia admins get access to the results when the survey closes. This gives you a chance to prepare some communications before publishing the results to the rest of the organization.

We show you a message template you can copy when you publish the results. We recommend also mentioning:

• your top 3 findings from the results

• instructions on what happens next

Automatic results message

Swarmia automatically sends a Slack message to the survey participants 1 hour after you publish the results.