Doing a salary poll or survey - best tools?

[JuliaJRH]

Doing a salary poll or survey - best tools?

[jueyang]

Hey Julia, thanks for walking me through your thought process. I have some suggestions based on what you said here.

First, 👍 for having a clear idea of your users and goals:

finding out the income distribution of newsroom social media editor, a pretty small population size

And it's great that you have identified a problem:

there's no super-easy way for people to talk about this sensitive issue on a large scale.

Main thread + questions

The main thread I see from your process is this: social media editors are not talking/have no ways to talk about their salaries. Information is not transparent.

So here are some questions for you:

1. What kind of change would you like to see by providing people a way of talking about salary? What's the higher goal beyond just starting a conversation?
2. What do you mean by large scale? How do you measure the scale?
3. How to facilitate a conversation that could push the agenda while protecting people’s privacy? What’s the benefit of being totally/partially transparent?
4. What's particular about your community? Since they are all social media editors, are they more likely to be on top of their social media as the main way of consuming information?
5. Is there any implication of your higher goal to other communities in the newsrooms and/or other industries?

First steps

I'd like to develop a poll/survey (what's the difference?) that I can send to specific sources I've talked to and that they can send to their work friends. Then after I get enough responses (how many is enough?), I'll develop a way to share that information back to the community, which will provide them a benefit, and hopefully encourage others to share their salaries.

Good idea! I would think the first step of what you are doing is closer to a survey. (If you are interesting to learning the difference between poll and survey, this and this wikipedia page help :)

This survey doesn’t have to be comprehensive. It doesn't even have to be distributed among the biggest audience. But --

It needs to be clear on what point you would like to make with each question. Elaborate the geographical/market size/cost-of-living a bit more. Do you aim to get first-person account for this? Or is this something you could get from elsewhere?

Unloading some data to third party datasets might have a few benefits, namely:

1. You are using a consistent measure across all participants, thus ruling out biases (say cost of living for a single person and a young family would be pretty different.
2. You make life easier for those who choose to answer the survey.

Next steps

Or it could be something interactive, where after you put in your information, it immediately is able to tell you where you stand compared with others with your experience level, or your geography, or whatever parameters you choose.

Great. You don’t have to have a huge chunk of data to make that happen. Make it clear to your participants how many other people to which they are compared.

Should I just go ahead and write a survey in Google Forms or something, post it and start collecting data, figuring out exactly what I want to do with it later?*

Yes. Get a group of participants to answer questions you think will demonstrate a point. Google form is easy to create, manage and distribute. So use it.

[jueyang]

Also. See what has been done.

• Buzzfeed simple survey. Read the asterisk. http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/heres-what-female-and-male-journalists-actually-make#.uiPq3B1Od
• Glassdoor anecdote. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/social-media-editor-salary-SRCH_KO0,19.htm

[jueyang]

Enjoyed your presentation! Looking forward to your idea blurb.