Increasing satisfaction survey response rate from federal tenants - calendar invite
Emails including a calendar invite reminder led to increased survey responses from federal employees
Front of building
What was the challenge?
GSA’s Public Buildings Service (PBS) owns or leases over 9,600 assets, with more than 370M square feet of space for over one million federal employees. Each year, PBS sends Federal employees the Tenant Satisfaction Survey (TSS), the results of which inform the Federal facilities strategy.
What was the program change?
Small details, such as the framing of an email, can matter more than might be expected. Varying delivery methods (e.g., a calendar-based reminder) of workplace email requests can affect email open and click-through rates. We created a calendar reminder feature for the TSS to see if it resulted in higher open and click-through rates.
How did the evaluation work?
29,997 employees were randomly assigned to receive one of two emails: 14,997 received the business as usual launch email, and 15,000 received an email with an embedded calendar invite to use as a reminder to take the survey. The two emails had distinct links to two identical versions of the survey, allowing tracking of views, starts, and completions by email group.
What was the impact?
One week after sending the emails, the calendar reminder resulted in a nearly 1 percentage point higher completion rate amongst people sent the email, and a 13.5% higher relative completion rate.
