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GCN Home > August 14, 2000 issue

Lab’s online survey nets double the average response rate

Program was easy to use, manager says, and helped Energy target questions to generate feedback

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory got a higher than expected response rate—54 percent—on a recent employee survey via the Web.

It didn’t hurt that the survey was dressed up with graphics and photos of NREL workers, said Roger Forsyth, improvement program manager in the Quality and Assessment Office at the Golden, Colo., Energy Department lab.


The National Renewable Energy Lab added employee photos and graphics to its recent Web survey to build interest. The survey used InterForm99 software from Raosoft Inc. of Seattle. Top managers had reports available by browser as soon as the survey period closed. Red bars on reports indicate areas for possible management action.


NREL handles the department’s research into renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar power, alternative fuels, hybrid vehicles and geothermal energy.

Most of NREL’s employees are in Colorado, either at headquarters or at the wind technology center in Boulder. A small group works in Washington.

Before Forsyth joined NREL in January, the human resources department had conducted occasional, limited surveys. “This was our first concentrated effort to get a sampling of the entire lab,” he said.

As a recent Air Force retiree, Forsyth was familiar with that service’s Web-distributed Chief of Staff Survey [GCN, Jan. 24, Page 33], developed with InterForm99 software from Raosoft Inc. of Seattle. He said NREL officials chose the same software for the lab’s spring 2000 survey because of its ease of implementation and the company’s expertise.

“We didn’t have to train somebody to use the software or to go in and program it,” he said of the template-based InterForm.

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Forsyth started work on the survey in mid-January. He flew to Seattle to work with six Raosoft programmers on formatting the questions and the reports that would be generated from the data.

The NREL survey reused some of the Air Force survey’s questions. Forsyth revised other questions to fit the energy lab’s civilian work force.

The survey ran on a Raosoft Web server under Linux, company president Catherine McDole Rao said. Forsyth sent the survey’s private uniform resource locator to all lab employees via e-mail, along with instructions to sign on using a made-up name and password.

Although the questionnaire was anonymous, it asked each respondent to enter general job classification, gender, length of employment and approximate age. That let managers analyze the answers of supervisors and subordinates separately.



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