How-to Post Your COVID-19 Business Survey
The COVID-19 Survey of Businesses is free and you can tailor the questions to your community.
Accessing the survey
If you do not already have a Polco profile for your community, you may sign up for one here. Once signed in:
- Visit the Content section and look for the Recommended Content on the right.
- Choose the COVID-19 Business Survey and click Add as Draft (you can edit these before you publish the survey).
- In this case, as we are not contacting residents, we want to turn off Polco's voter-list verification feature. To do that “enable guest responses” at the bottom of the Create Survey page
- The survey is now ready to publish. Click on the survey in the list, make any additional edits you'd like, and click Publish at the bottom.
Note: Ensure your profile is active by including an image and description before publishing. At any point, if you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team using the chat form in the bottom right. We usually respond within 1-2 minutes.
Messaging for Business Surveys
The best way to promote your survey is the use of existing email address lists you have for businesses in your community.
Suggested message for email invitations
Email Subject Line: Help us understand the needs of our business community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dear Business Owner/Manager:
We know this is a challenging time in our community trying to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. We want to know about your challenges and needs operating a business as we move through this pandemic. The survey will only take a few minutes to fill out using {add survey URL} link.
Thank you for helping us with this important project!
Sincerely,
In addition (or instead of) email invitations, you will want to promote on your website and through social media. You want to let your community know why you are asking these questions, and what you will do with the information. Suggested message for website or social media
{Organization name} is asking our community business owners and managers to tell us how you are dealing with COVID-19 - Please complete this quick survey {add survey URL}.
We will also be posting about this on Facebook and Twitter. Please share those messages with other business owners and managers, to ensure participation by a wide variety of industry. Be sure the voice of the business community is heard.
Video Walkthrough
This focuses on posting our resident surveys - but the steps are the same!
(Optional) Allowing guest responses
In some cases, it is not necessary to use Polco's verification feature to verify residency of respondents - like in this case of administering a survey to a known list of local business owners. You can enable guest responses at the bottom of the Create Survey page:
Not using Polco yet? Request a free profile here.