How do we get people to fill in our survey?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: the same position — the legal half is data protection, which is reserved, and the survey advice is UK-wide practice. Northern Ireland: the same position, reserved in exactly the same way.

Part 1 — the legal requirement: consent is usually the wrong basis

Every beneficiary survey that collects personal data must have a lawful basis under UK GDPR. For the people you help, consent is usually the wrong one. This half is law. It applies across the UK — England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland alike — because data protection is reserved, and the regulator is the ICO.

This step assumes you have already designed how you will collect the data and chosen a survey as part of it.

UK GDPR has several lawful bases. Consent is only one of them.

Charities reach for consent first. The research found that organisations have long relied on it far too much. With vulnerable groups, that causes a direct problem.

Consent is not the right basis for processing you need to provide the service. The reason is simple: “a person should not feel they have to agree as a condition of receiving help.” Someone who relies on you for support is not in a position to say no freely. And consent that cannot be freely withdrawn is not consent at all.

The other bases include legitimate interests, vital interests and a task in the public interest. Which one fits depends on your charity and what the survey is for. This page does not name the right basis for you, and neither does the research behind it.

Establish your lawful basis for each purpose walks through the bases. The ICO runs a free helpline for small organisations.

Children

Where a child is in a dependent or vulnerable position, give them time. Give them the chance to talk about taking part with an adult they trust. The consent standard in UK GDPR is hard to meet here. The public task basis, or a basis for research, is usually more appropriate.

Special category data

If you work with people who are homeless, in recovery, refugees, or survivors of domestic abuse, you are almost certainly handling special category data. That is a separate and stricter regime. It needs a second condition on top of the lawful basis. That condition is set out when you establish your lawful basis, and it is not repeated here.

“It’s for research” is not a basis

A survey run to evaluate your work may fall under the research and statistics rules in UK GDPR. Those rules were rewritten in February 2026, and they are not a lawful basis on their own. Get consent and handle beneficiary data ethically covers them, including one trap that catches ordinary, well-run charities.

Part 2 — convention and good practice: a beneficiary survey people will finish

This half is not law. It is the usual advice from the UK government’s own survey methodology bodies, and from NCVO working with NPC. It is well founded. None of it has been tested in a study of charity beneficiaries in particular.

Design it for the person answering. The usual starting point is to design around the respondent and cut the burden on them. Then test it with real people before you send it out.

Write it in plain language. Government survey guidance pitches content near the UK’s average reading age. It uses short sentences and no jargon or abbreviations. It names poor language and tone as a cause of lower response.

Build trust. Government Social Research warns that eroded trust “could affect response rates for your survey and for other surveys your organisation runs.” Explain honestly what the survey is for. Tell people what you found afterwards. Both lower the barrier to taking part.

Offer more than one way to answer. Paper, online, phone and face to face each reach different people. A digital-only survey leaves out anyone without internet access, skills or confidence. Most guidance keeps a non-digital fallback.

Use the trust you already have.The Government Social Research “Guide to inclusive social research practices” names charities and community groups as trusted bodies well placed to reach “seldom heard” groups. For your own beneficiaries, you are that body. Asking in person, through the staff or volunteers people already know, is the usual route.

Send a reminder. NCVO and NPC call reminders the biggest single lever. Most responses arrive within a day of a send. So a targeted reminder to those who have not answered is the main way to lift completion.

Keep it short. Ask only what you will use. Government statistics producers treat respondent burden as a formal principle.

Keep any incentive modest. A voucher, or a donation made on the person’s behalf, may help. Government ethics guidance warns against any incentive whose type or size is coercive. That matters most with people already receiving help from you.

Is there a response-rate benchmark?

No reliable response-rate benchmark exists for UK charity beneficiary surveys, though you will want a target.

The government’s survey methodology bodies publish no figure at all. That is deliberate. They treat response rate as too dependent on context to benchmark, and point to burden, trust and mode as the things you can change.

NCVO, with NPC, does publish one informal rule of thumb. It is for voluntary-sector online surveys in general, not for surveys of the people a charity helps. It rests on one source, and its own page does not show a method. We have not printed it here, because it is not a validated benchmark and it was never meant as a target.

You may also find a response-rate figure on a software supplier’s website. A number in a sales FAQ, with no source and no method, is not a benchmark either.

So the honest advice is this. Pilot the survey. Measure your own rate. Improve it over time.

The target that goes in your plan is your own last result, plus whatever you have changed since.

Where this page stops

This page stops at two points.

The lawful basis. It explains why consent usually fails. It does not choose a basis for you, because the right one depends on your charity. The ICO’s free helpline for small organisations is the first call. Establish your lawful basis for each purpose is the page on this site that owns the question.

Safeguarding. Get a safeguarding adviser’s view before you survey children or adults at risk. Get it too if the questions touch abuse, health, addiction or home life, or if you might learn something that needs acting on. Your own safeguarding lead is the starting point.

A survey that asks a distressing question needs a plan for what happens next. That plan belongs in your safeguarding policy, not in the survey.

Before paying anyone: UK GDPR is free to read at legislation.gov.uk, and the ICO’s guidance on lawful basis is free. Your local council for voluntary service can often talk through a small charity’s set-up at no charge.

With the survey tested, the next step is to get consent and handle beneficiary data ethically for what people tell you.

Common mistake: setting a target response rate from a figure found online

Benchmark figures are everywhere, and they read plausibly. But no reliable response-rate benchmark exists for UK charity beneficiary surveys. The one sector rule of thumb is for online surveys in general and is not validated. A supplier’s figure with no source is not evidence at all. Set your target from your own pilot.

Common mistake: deciding “we’ll just get consent”

Consent is the lawful basis everyone has heard of, and organisations have long relied on it too much. For people receiving your help, consent is usually not freely given, so it is usually not the right basis.

UK GDPR provides several lawful bases. Answers from vulnerable groups are very likely to be special category data as well. That is a legal requirement, UK-wide.

Worked example

Tollgate Youth CIO drafts an end-of-course survey for the young people on its programme. The trustees want a target response rate for the funder’s plan.

The first question is the lawful basis. The young people receive a service from Tollgate, so their consent is usually not freely given, and consent is usually not the right basis.

Some questions touch on health and home life, which makes the answers likely to be special category data. Tollgate records the basis before anything goes out, using the running hub’s page on lawful basis and the ICO helpline. It does not guess.

The second is safeguarding. The survey goes to Tollgate’s safeguarding lead before anyone under eighteen sees it.

Then the design. The worker cuts the survey to the questions the funder report will use. It is rewritten in plain words and tried on three young people first. It goes out on paper at the last session and by text afterwards, with one reminder.

The target response rate is left blank in the first plan. There is no reliable benchmark to borrow. After the pilot, Tollgate writes in its own figure and a plan to improve on it.