Here are some of the best questions for a citizen survey about small business support, plus practical tips on making them effective. If you want to build a highly engaging, conversational survey on this topic, you can generate one in seconds with Specific.
Best open-ended questions for citizen survey about small business support
Open-ended questions let people share what’s really on their minds, helping you surface nuanced insights and recurring themes that multiple-choice alone would miss. They’re especially powerful when you want to uncover barriers, opportunities, or specific details about how citizens interact with and perceive small businesses in their community.
What local small businesses do you most frequently visit, and why?
Can you share a recent positive experience you had with a small business in your area?
What challenges do you think small businesses in our community face today?
How do you usually find out about new small businesses or local promotions?
What types of support (events, communication, policy changes) would help you engage more with small businesses?
Describe any barriers or frustrations you’ve encountered when shopping at local small businesses.
How do small businesses in our area contribute to the community’s overall quality of life?
What recommendations do you have for improving communication between small businesses and residents?
Share your ideas for programs or events that could better connect citizens with small business owners.
If you could change one thing to make it easier to support small businesses here, what would it be?
Open-ended questions can help you reach beyond assumptions, especially given that only 34% of small business owners reported having a good sense of available federal support programs, while 71% rated government communication “C or below”—citizens likely feel similar gaps when seeking information about local business initiatives. [1]
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for citizen survey about small business support
Single-select multiple-choice questions are great when you need to quantify preferences or behaviors, or when you want to get the conversation started before diving deeper. Sometimes it’s faster (especially on mobile) to select an option than to write out an answer—plus it helps you spot trends at a glance. From there, you can follow up for more details.
Question: How often do you intentionally shop at local small businesses?
Multiple times per week
Once a week
1–3 times per month
Rarely
Never
Question: Which factor most influences your decision to choose small businesses over larger chains?
Quality of products/services
Convenience
Supporting the local economy
Price
Other
Question: What is the biggest barrier to shopping at small businesses in your area?
Lack of product variety
Higher prices
Unawareness of local options
Inconvenient location/hours
Other
When to follow up with “why?” If someone picks “Never” for shopping locally, or “Unawareness of local options” as their top barrier, asking “Why is that?” or “Can you share more about what would help?” can unlock the real reasons behind their choices—which you can use to improve programs or outreach. The follow-up provides the missing context that statistics alone can’t offer.
When and why to add the “Other” choice? Sometimes respondents face situations you didn’t anticipate. Including “Other” (with a prompt to explain) allows you to capture unexpected issues or ideas. The real gold is in the open-text follow-up, which helps you spot new trends that might otherwise stay hidden.
Should you include a net promoter score (NPS) question?
NPS is a standard question that measures advocacy: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend supporting small businesses in your community to others?” It’s simple, but gives you a benchmark for overall sentiment. For small business support, NPS helps gauge whether citizens are just passive supporters or strong promoters of your local business ecosystem. You can automatically add an NPS question to your survey in Specific, and then see segmented feedback by promoters, passives, and detractors for targeted follow-ups.
This is especially valuable given small businesses' crucial role in job creation—contributing 70% of net job growth since 2019—and highlights where community advocacy may fall short. [3]
The power of follow-up questions
Open-ended and multiple choice questions provide the foundation, but it’s the smart follow-up questions that turn surface answers into deep insights. We designed Specific’s automatic AI follow-up questions to probe for “why” and “how,” adapting to the respondent’s words in real time—just like a sharp interviewer would.
This approach saves you hours of back-and-forth email followups and dramatically improves quality, all while keeping the survey conversation engaging. For instance:
Citizen: “I rarely shop at small businesses because they’re inconvenient.”
AI follow-up: “Could you share some examples of what makes shopping at local small businesses inconvenient for you?”
Citizen: “I don’t hear about local business events.”
AI follow-up: “What’s your preferred way to receive information about local events or promotions?”
This way, you avoid unclear feedback, so when you see responses like “It’s too expensive” you don’t have to guess what “expensive” really means—the conversation naturally uncovers it.
How many followups to ask? Typically, 2–3 follow-up questions are enough to clarify intent, motivation, and specifics without annoying respondents. With Specific, you can set follow-up depth and allow respondents to move on once you’ve got the insight you need.
This makes it a conversational survey: Instead of rigid forms, your survey unfolds like a real chat. Respondents feel understood, and you get richer data on the first try.
Response analysis / AI survey analysis: Even with dozens or hundreds of open-text replies, using AI for survey analysis lets you summarize, extract key themes, and explore nuances at scale—no manual coding or data wrangling required.
Specific’s AI followups are something most people haven’t tried—give our AI survey builder a spin and see how much easier it is to spark thoughtful, actionable responses.
Prompting ChatGPT (or other GPTs) for citizen small business support survey questions
If you want AI to suggest questions for your survey, start with a direct prompt like this:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for Citizen survey about Small Business Support.
But keep in mind, the more context you provide about your audience, the purpose, and your goals, the better the questions will be:
I’m conducting a citizen survey for local government to understand how residents support small businesses, identify barriers, and find new ways to encourage engagement. Suggest 10 open-ended and 5 multiple choice questions covering shopping habits, perceptions, awareness of programs, and ideas for improvement.
Next, ask the AI to organize the questions:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Then choose categories that matter most, and drill down:
Generate 10 questions for categories “Barriers to engagement” and “Ideas for improvement.”
This iterative approach lets you quickly arrive at a high-quality, targeted survey.
What is a conversational survey?
Traditional surveys are static—a long list of questions you fill out, usually in a form. A conversational survey feels like a natural chat, with the AI adapting questions, clarifying unclear responses, and prompting for more detail in a friendly, human way. This method, pioneered by Specific, not only increases engagement but dramatically improves data quality.
Manual Surveys | AI-Generated Conversational Surveys |
|---|---|
Static questions | Dynamic, adaptive questions |
Little or no probing | Automated smart follow-ups |
Manual analysis | Instant AI summaries and analysis |
Impersonal experience | Feels like a helpful conversation |
Why use AI for citizen surveys? AI survey tools let you build (and iterate) a full, smart survey in seconds—saving hours of manual effort, removing guesswork, and powering through analysis much faster than you could on your own. This is why the best AI survey makers, like Specific, are quickly becoming standard for research and civic feedback.
We’ve built Specific so anyone—no research background required—can get deep qualitative input and enjoy the process. You can tweak questions, logic, and tone using the AI survey editor, allowing you to refine your conversational survey by chatting naturally with our platform.
For step-by-step tips, check our guide on how to create a survey for citizen input on small business support. You’ll see why so many teams are shifting from rigid forms to conversational, AI-generated surveys.
Specific delivers the best user experience for both survey creators and respondents—meaning higher response rates and more insightful, actionable feedback for every project.
See this small business support survey example now
See exactly how conversational surveys transform small business support feedback—build actionable, engaging questions and get richer insights in minutes. Ready to uncover what your citizens really think? Start your AI-powered survey today.