A great report will increase the impact of your survey results and encourage more readers to engage with the content.
In This Article
Let’s walk through some tricks and techniques with real examples.
The most important thing about a survey report is that it allows readers to make sense of data. Visualizations are a key component of any survey summary.
Pie charts are perfect when you want to bring statistics to life. Here’s a great example from a wedding survey:
Pie charts can be simple and still get the message across. A well-designed chart will also add impact and reinforce the story you want to tell.
Here’s another great example from a homebuyer survey introduction:
If your survey is made up of open-ended questions, it might be more challenging to produce charts. If that’s the case, you can write up your findings instead. We’ll look at that next.
When you’re thinking about how to write a summary of survey results, remember that the introduction needs to get the reader’s attention.
Focusing on key facts helps you to do that right at the start.
This is why it’s usually best to write the survey introduction at the end once the rest of the survey report has been compiled. That way, you know what the big takeaways are.
This is an easy and powerful way to write a survey introduction that encourages the reader to investigate.
Here’s an awesome example of a survey summary that immediately draws the eye.
The key finding is presented first, and then we see a fact about half the group immediately after:
Using this order lets us see the impactful survey responses right up top.
If you need help deciding which questions to ask in your survey, check out this article on the best survey questions to include.
Your survey summary should give the reader a complete overview of the content. But you don’t want to take up too much space.
Survey summaries are sometimes called executive summaries because they’re designed to be quickly digested by decision-makers.
You’ll want to filter out the less important findings and focus on what matters. A 1-page summary is enough to get this information across. You might want to leave space for a table of contents on this page too.
One way to keep a survey summary short is to use a teaser at the start.
Here’s an example introduction that doesn’t state all of its findings but gives us the incentive to keep reading:
And here’s a great survey introduction that summarizes the findings in just one sentence:
In WPForms, you can reduce the size of your survey report by excluding questions you don’t need. We decided to remove this question from the report PDF because it has no answers. Just click the arrow at the top, and it won’t appear in the final printout:
This is a great way to quickly build a PDF summary of your survey that only includes the most important questions. You can also briefly explain your methodology.
When you create a survey in WordPress, you probably have a good idea of your reasons for doing so.
Make your purpose clear in the intro. For example, if you’re running a demographic survey, you might want to clarify that you’ll use this information to target your audience more effectively.
The reader must know exactly what you want to find out. Ideally, you should also explain why you wanted to create the survey in the first place. This can help you to reach the correct target audience for your survey.
This vehicle survey was carried out to help with future planning, so the introduction makes the purpose clear to the reader:
Having focused questions can help to give your survey a clear purpose. We have some questionnaire examples and templates that can help with that.
Explaining why you ran the survey helps to give context, which we’ll talk about more next.
Including numbers in a survey summary is important. But your survey summary should tell a story too.
Adding numbers to your introduction will help draw the eye, but you’ll also want to explain what the numbers tell you.
Otherwise, you’ll have a list of statistics that don’t mean much to the reader.
Here’s a great example of a survey introduction that uses the results from the survey to tell a story.
Another way to put numbers in context is to present the results visually.
Here, WPForms has automatically created a table from our Likert Scale question that makes it easy to see a positive trend in the survey data:
If you’d like to use a Likert scale to produce a chart like this, check out this article on the best Likert scale questions for survey forms.
Now that your survey report is done, you’ll likely want action to be taken based on your findings.
That’s why it’s a good idea to make a recommendation.
If you already explained your reasons for creating the survey, you can naturally add a few sentences on the outcomes you want to see.
Here’s a nice example of a survey introduction that clearly states the outcomes that the organization would like to happen now that the survey is published:
This helps to focus the reader on the content and helps them to understand why the survey is important. Respondents are more likely to give honest answers if they believe that a positive outcome will come from the survey.
You can also cite related research here to give your reasoning more weight.
You can easily create pie charts in the WPForms Surveys and Polls addon. It allows you to change the way your charts look without being overwhelmed by design options.
This handy feature will save tons of time when you’re composing your survey results.
Once you have your charts, exporting them allows you to use them in other ways. You may want to embed them in marketing materials like:
WPForms makes it easy to export any graphic from your survey results so you can use it on your website or in slides.
Just use the dropdown to export your survey pie chart as a JPG or PDF:
And that’s it! You now know how to create an impactful summary of survey results and add these to your marketing material or reports.
WPForms is the best form builder plugin for WordPress. As well as having the best survey tools, it also has the best data export options.
Often, you’ll want to export form entries to analyze them in other tools. You can do exactly the same thing with your survey data.
For example, you can:
We really like the Google Sheets addon in WPForms because it sends your entries to a Google Sheet as soon as they’re submitted. And you can connect any form or survey to a Sheet without writing any code.
The Google Sheets integration is powerful enough to send all of your metrics. You can add columns to your Sheet and map the data points right from your WordPress form.
This is an ideal solution if you want to give someone else access to your survey data so they can crunch the numbers in spreadsheet format.
We’ll finish up with a few questions we’ve been asked about survey reporting.
A survey report compiles all data collected during a survey and presents it objectively. The report often summarizes pages of data from all responses received and makes it easier for the audience to process and digest.
The best way to present survey results is to use visualizations. Charts, graphs, and infographics will make your survey outcomes easier to interpret.
For online surveys, WPForms has an awesome Surveys and Polls addon that makes it easy to publish many types of surveys and collect data using special survey fields:
You can turn on survey reporting at any time, even if the form expiry date has passed.
To present your results, create a beautiful PDF by clicking Print Survey Report right from the WordPress dashboard:
To create a great survey summary, you’ll want to start out with a great survey form. Check out this article on how to create a survey form online to learn how to create and customize your surveys in WordPress.
Ready to build your survey? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes free survey form templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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Claire is the Content Manager for the WPForms team. She has 13+ years' experience writing about WordPress and web hosting. Learn More
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Hi Jocasta! Glad to hear that you enjoyed our article! Please check back often as we’re always adding new content as well as updating old ones!
Thuku Muita says: Hi, I need to write an opinion poll report would you help with a sample I could use Henry Cee says:Hi Thuku, I’m sorry but we don’t have any such examples available as it’s a bit outside our purview. A quick Google search does show some sites with information and examples regarding this though. I hope that helps!
Nigel RT Stedman says:With the Likert Scale what visualisation options are available? For example if there were 30 questions… I would like to be able to total up for all questions how many said never, or often… etc… and for each ‘x’ option for example if it was chocolate bars down the side and never through to often across the top… for each question… I would like to total for all questions for each chocolate bar… the totals of never through to often…? can you help?
Nikhil Sebastian says:Hey Nigel- to achieve what you’ve mentioned, I’d recommend you to make use of the Survey and Poll addon that has the ability to display the number of polls count. Here is a complete guide on this addon If you’ve any questions, please get in touch with the support team and we’d be happy to assist you further! Thanks, and have a good one 🙂
Ivory Marshall says:Hello, I am looking for someone to roll-up survey responses and prepare presentations/graphs. I have 58 responses.
Does this company offer this as an option? If so, what are the cost?
