Acronym

This makes me think of THE ULTIMATE QUESTION, which is used to determine an organization's Net Promoter Score (NPS). That is, "on a scale of 0-10 how likely would you be to recommend X to your colleagues." Of course, for this to be useful you have to be able to ask the same thing again in the future, but I guess that still meets your one question criteria.

For purposes of thinking about your organization's value proposition, I'm still a fan of this question. "If your company/association/practice went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss you and why?"

Whatever that one question is, my question is this: how is that information shared, reviewed, and acted upon in a timely fashion throughout the enterprise once it has been received? And is it shared back to the membership?

ASAE has done a great job asking its one question on almost every evaluation form I've received. I'd love to see an aggregate of what people have said.

I always go with my old favorite 'What are you wearing?' But seriously, Jeffrey is ultra-right when it comes to applying and communicating what we've learned.

Companies have embraced the net promoter score as an excellent tool in environments where their current or potential customers have little affinity, loyalty, or attention spans. But with our typical constituencies, we have the ability to ask a couple of questions at least (even though that violates the spirit of your post), and we need to. We should be able to ask at least two questions, one to qualify the initial response to our short, snappy question, and to render it usable to better understand things and to improve what we do and how we do it...

Following the ultimate question should be 'Why?' Their initial response will be so focused on us as an institution--what we've done for you, how we've formed the impression we have, why you like or don't like us, and how that influences your sense that you would or would not refer us. It's always helpful to flesh this out. By itself, knowing you're a '7' doesn't do much good if I want to actually do something about impressing you and influencing you to rate us better over time. If you're a '10' I need to know how or what we did to get you there, so we can learn from and build on our successes.

Rich's question is quite a bit broader of course. The followup here, pessimistically, might be 'How likely do you believe it is that we can accomplish this?' How many of us as advocates have one legislative or regulatory issue we just can't budge, so we're seen as ineffective for not making the individual's life easier? Or if the member needs more hours in the day, do we have the scope to actually make them more efficient? And of course non-members (and perhaps many members) might simply answer 'you can't' and I would want to know why they feel that way (ignorance, pessimism) and what we could do over time to increase their awareness of and their confidence in us). As Tracy suggests, one reason for asking a question now and asking it over time is to create a baseline for the future--it would be nice to act on what we learn to generate more positive metrics in the future.

Thanks everyone. It's true: picking a single question would only get you halfway to a positive result. The step immediately following—how you dig deeper and use that information—would be just as important.

I think the "and why?" follow-up is vital, because it gets the respondent to go beyond just a brief idea and open up about their needs and desires in a way that offers the questioner a deeper understanding of the respondent's life and mindset. I'd guess the challenge is that answers to "why" are hard to process en masse. Multiple-choice and other quantitative questions are easy to aggregate, and even a question like "How can we make your life easier?" will result in a list of brief ideas that should be fairly easy to sort through. But all the stories that you'd get in response to "why" would have to be read thoroughly and couldn't be sorted and categorized so easily.