Designing a Church Library Survey (Part 1)

It was a bright winter’s day when it suddenly occurred to me that I should consider creating a survey for the church library. Recently, the fellowship committee in our church sent out a questionnaire to the congregation on the topic of the weekly coffee social following the service. Having never sent out a survey myself for the church library, I thought that it was high time that this important outreach ministry be examined at close range.

Since I didn’t have any real experience creating a survey, I did some research on ye olde Internet. I found a really fantastic article by George Plosker from Online magazine. Granted, the article was over 10 years old but its contents were still relatively applicable, as most items or suggestions were of a practical nature. The following is a summary of Plosker’s article Conducting User Surveys: An Ongoing Information Imperative with the information extracted that would be most useful in a church library setting.

Does creating a survey sound like too much work? Here’s a helpful, if not convincing, hint: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it!

To begin, a survey will do all the following:

• Reveal issues or opportunities
• Identify needs
• Obtain information for strategic planning
• As a bonus – a survey serves as a great marketing tool!

Statistics found that one unhappy customer will tell nine to 13 customers about his or her bad experience, and only 4% of unhappy customers actually complain to the company. So it’s good to know where your patrons are at in order to be aware of needed improvements!

(Next time: Beginning your survey)