Survey your organisation

Want to survey your organisation to see how diverse you are? Here’s a survey you can use.

The Survey

This survey asks your organisation members about:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Ethnicity
  • Religion
  • LGBTQIA Identity

See a preview of the survey as a Google Form →

How to use this form

Follow these steps to reuse this survey:

  1. Copy this Google Form to your organisation’s Google account.
  2. Edit the introduction and end of the form to include your contact details, in case respondents have any questions for you.
  3. Check who has access to this form, to ensure only the appropriate people in your organisation can access the form responses. You can find these in the “⋮” menu in the upper right of the form editor, under “Add collaborators”.
  4. Get the survey link, from the “Send” button in the upper right of the form editor.
  5. Share the link with your organisation’s members!

What to say when sending out the form

When sending out the form it’s important that you are clear why you are asking these questions, and that you address potential concerns.

Our research shows us that responders’ concerns fall into the following categories:

  • wanting to know why personal questions are being asked
  • wanting to understand exactly how the data will be stored and used, which may affect how they choose to answer
  • wanting to have some control over revealing personal information publicly even if it’s done in aggregate

We chose to prioritise the individual’s right to protect their privacy when visualising data. Read more about how we did it and what that means.

Downsides of using a Google Form

Google Forms are free to use, easy to share, and easy to duplicate, but they aren’t perfect. Some downsides are:

  • The label next to the free text option on each question reads “Other”, which is far from ideal when asking about identities. It cannot be changed to something more appropriate, for example “Self-described”.
  • They require the organisation to already use Google services internally.
  • The results are stored by Google, and depending on your company policies this may not be acceptable.

Why we ask these questions

You can read more about how we chose the questions to ask, and what we hope you can learn from them.