Regularly surveying your commuters is an important way to understand the big picture of the commute realities among your workforce.
RideAmigos includes a powerful Commuter Survey tool that can be used by any network or system manager to easily collect and analyze high-quality commuter data.
Commuter Survey Best Practices
#1 - Determine Frequency
Generally commuter surveys are conducted at least once per calendar year, and sometimes as frequently as every quarter. Start by determining how frequently you will survey your commuters.
#2 - Pick a Survey Week
Next you'll need to pick a week that will be used to represent a typical commute week. To ensure your data is an accurate representation of normal commute patterns you should not choose a week that includes a holiday or other scheduled event (like a company retreat) that will lead to less-typical commute patterns.
Once you have selected and approved your survey week you should not share the planned dates with anyone outside of the process of administering the survey. Notifying commuters of a survey week ahead of time may influence their commute behaviors and skew your data.
#3 - Set Up Your Survey
Log into RideAmigos and head to the Management Dashboard for the network you want to survey. If you manage multiple networks (employers, worksites, etc.) and there is not a network specific to the group you plan to survey you can either create a new subnetwork or use the main network you manage.
After choosing a network select "Surveys" from the left menu, then "New Survey."
To make use of built in survey analysis and reporting tools, select Commuter Insights Survey. You may also have other survey template options that are specific to your region. If you're running a survey for compliance or participation in such regional programs choose your template accordingly.
Give your survey a name and add the necessary information for initial survey setup.
- If your survey is for a specific worksite you can add the worksite's location.
- We recommend you not require users to be logged in for this use case.
- Be sure to add the number of people being surveyed!
Depending on the template you're using you may also need to edit the survey questions to update descriptive text, like adding the dates of the survey week, or adding additional questions specific to your worksite. Depending on your template some questions may not be editable.
Save your survey and the interface will update to include a Survey URL.
#4 - Plan Your Communications
To get a statistically significant response rate from your surveyed commuters you will need to have a strong communication plan for encouraging users to respond.
Because there are a wide variety of programs and tools in use among employers and worksites it's best to plan on using whatever your usual communication platforms are to promote the survey and share the link. For some this may be a company-wide email. For others it may be break-room fliers with QR codes, text messages, or other online tools used for your team.
You will want to start sending communications and gathering responses the week after your survey week. This way users can respond while the previous week is fresh in their minds, but you're not influencing their behaviors by announcing it earlier.
#5 - Final Preparations & Launch
As you make final preparations for your survey be sure to select "Start Survey" on your survey's edit screen. If users visit your survey page prior to it being started they will see a message saying that the survey is not currently accepting responses.
You may also want to test completing your survey to ensure you can answer any support questions that arise.
To view the responses to your survey use the row action button for the survey you're running and select "View Responses." You can then delete individual test responses using row actions.
#6 - Monitor Responses
To ensure statistical significance of your survey data RideAmigos recommends you continue to promote your survey until 75% of the total number of people surveyed have responded. (Different regional survey response rate requirements may vary from 50% upward. Some regional programs require counting non-responses as drive-alone trips.)
#7 - Closing Your Survey
Once you have collected an adequate number of survey responses you should close your survey to prevent additional responses from coming in once you start running your final reports and analysis.
Reporting
All RideAmigos surveys provide a comprehensive dataset of all your survey's responses. Depending on the template you use you may also have access to additional reporting calculations and visualizations.
<Link to 2022 Commuter Survey Reporting>