July 2012

I came to Idealware from the library world: I earned a master’s degree in library and information science and worked as an archivist for a few years.  Archivists make sure that users can access and understand information in all formats for years to come. Not all information survives, of course. In fact, at the National Archives, where I worked, we were tasked with preserving and describing only those Federal government records deemed “permanent”, or critical for our democracy to continue to function. (That’s only about 1%-3% of all the records that the Federal government generates.)

Did we have to make sure all this important stuff was kicking around forever? Not exactly.  Even acid-free paper disintegrates eventually, no matter how much you do to preserve it. Born-digital records—e-mails, documents, video, audio, databases, photographs, etc—are proving to be even trickier.  Some digital preservation scholars think that future historians will call this era the digital dark age due to the amount of information our society faces losing.

What about your nonprofit’s electronic records—will they become a part of the digital dark age? Preserving your legacy might seem like a lofty issue, or one that only established organizations with institutional archives need to consider. But consider what would happen if all of your work e-mails vanished overnight, never to be seen again. How might that affect the health of your organization? What about all of your social media—what will happen to all of your carefully crafted posts and your network of followers if the platform you use folds? Check the End User License Agreement—the platform’s creators probably don’t owe you very much.

Chris Prom, an archivist at the University of Illinois and the brain behind the blog Practical E-Records, does a fabulous job of outlining the big-picture issues at hand in his paper “Facilitating Archives in a Facebook Era,” posted in draft form here. (Full disclosure—Chris was my boss when I was a graduate assistant at the University Archives.) Describing the problems inherent with “ensuring the preservation of evidence when people’s communication tools have, in effect, become the organization’s official recordkeeping mechanism”, he concludes that to capture e-mail, social media, and other ephemeral digital communications, “what people need most are practical tools and services.” A statement after Idealware’s own heart!

 Chris and his colleagues at Illinois are proposing to develop a tool called myKive, an open-source and customizable personal archiving software that will to capture the digital interactions of its users without affecting their daily routine and that will give them complete control over the data harvested. Like many others interested in digital records, I’ll be following the tool’s development closely in the hopes that it might have some application for nonprofits looking to preserve their digital legacy in an easy and cost-effective way. Let’s hope we can stave off the return of another dark age!

Surveys are an important part of my work at Idealware--they allow us to gather a large amount of information from nonprofits, and to get their perspectives on the technology they use. But surveys can be very difficult. If the survey is too long, most people will just stop answering questions; if people don't understand the questions, you won't get usable data.

While there's no such thing as a perfect survey, I've picked up a few tips for making the best possible survey that you can.

• Open-ended questions. These tend to get a lot of hate, mostly because they're not used correctly. But a few strategically placed comment boxes can help keep your respondents interested. For example, it's good to allow people to write in a response to a lot of basic demographic questions, like "What is your organization's primary focus area?" No matter how long or inclusive you think your list of answers is, people still don't want to be pigeon-holed. Adding that write-in field can help keep your respondents from feeling discouraged early-on. You may also want to consider adding a write-in box at the end of your survey, prompting people to "Describe something interesting about their organization," or something like that. You won't often get actually useful information out of it, but people like to answer them, and it allows them to explain themselves.
• Keep it short. Honestly, who hasn't started taking a survey, only to quit after one of ten pages? (I still do.) Why do organization keep making such long surveys? My guess is that they want to "shotgun" it; they figure that this survey is their only chance to ask their questions, so they try to cram in every question they have. Don't do this. Please. Try to focus your survey on a single topic, with only a few questions, but questions that will give you some answers. Let's say I'm surveying people's ice cream preferences. My first question will have them rate a list of ice cream flavors. The next questions will have the same list, but ask them which flavors they prefer in the spring, summer, fall, etc. (Remember to include an "opt-out" though: "None, I'm lactose-intolerant.") This way, I've only asked five questions, but I can easily compare them and see that pumpkin was the number one fall flavor, people don't eat ice cream in the winter, and that coffee is popular year-round.
• Pilot your survey. This is the single most important tip I can share. Before you unleash your survey upon the unsuspecting public, test it out on a few people you know. You want to try it out on people who would take the survey anyway. For example, if you're only sending the survey out to people with brown hair, ask a couple brunettes you know to try it out. Everyone will want to offer feedback about what they think you should ask, or what they like to see in surveys - ignore that. What you want to find out was if they understood the questions, and answered the way you expected. It's best to do this over the phone, and ask them to just think out loud. Oh, and keeping with the previous tip, try to keep track of how long they take--10 to 15 minutes is a good goal for a short, managable survey.

There you go, Kyle's Awesome Survey Tips. Feel free to share your own tips in the comment section.