Collecting Data on Social Enterprises 2025

Surveys are best tested and refined with a small group of social enterprises before wider distribution. This helps identify potential issues, such as excessive time requirements and unclear questions, and improves language accessibility, ensuring a smoother and more effective data collection process. Good design principles FIGURE 3. The experience of surveying social enterprises around the world can offer some guiding principles to aid survey design in future. Some points to bear in mind while designing survey questions include: Furthermore, when leaning on the experience of previous surveys, before adapting a survey question from a previous version or one used elsewhere, it is important to understand why the original methodology was designed and what would be lost if questions are omitted or altered.A clear understanding of how the questions will derive answers that can contribute to achieving the overall goals of the survey, clarity on what those goals are and what the value is to the social enterprise are essential. For instance, if the purpose is to demonstrate the particular role or contribution of social enterprises, or the specific challenges they face, the questions should elicit responses that provide evidence for such perspectives. The inclusion or exclusion criteria, based on the characteristics or practice of respondents, should form part of the survey; for instance, what organizations do with profits or what proportion of their income is generated through commercial activity. This enables filtering and analysis of respondents to focus on those that meet a defined set of social enterprise criteria.Finding a balance between close- ended questions to facilitate analysis and open-ended responses that allow respondents to tell their story in their own words, makes it possible to enrich quantitative data with qualitative insights, and to embed the principles of humility, respect, listening and curiosity in the research. Consideration should be given to wording questions to allow direct benchmarking of the responses against other businesses, other countries or previous surveys. This comparative approach allows for findings such as “social enterprises are more likely to x or y than business more widely.” Survey length, if excessive, can exacerbate respondent fatigue, lower response rates and undermine the robustness of the data collected.The structure of the survey – including sections and headings – should guide participants logically through the questions. Cultural sensitivities must be respected, such as by assessing the appropriateness of asking about income, profit or assets, and respecting the sensitive nature of certain demographic data, such as about age, gender or sexual orientation. This extends to considering whether the questions are respectful and relevant to all participants.Catering to economic context: Depending on the environment, questions should be tailored to issues such as informality, widespread use of mobile phones for surveys and financial literacy.Prioritizing clarity and simplicity of language, avoiding jargon or overly technical language, and respecting and adapting to the local context are important. This includes double-checking translations of survey questions in appropriate local languages. Collecting Data on Social Enterprises: A Playbook for Practitioners 12