Member Matching Survey Questions (With Template)

Every 1:1 matching program lives or dies on one unglamorous artifact: the intake survey. Whatever makes the pairing decision, an algorithm, an AI, or you with a spreadsheet, it can only work with what members told you. Ask the right questions and great matches become easy. Ask the wrong ones and even the smartest matching engine is guessing.

This guide gives you a complete, ready-to-use question set, organized by section, with a note on what each section lets you do at matching time. Steal it wholesale or trim it to fit.

Why the survey determines match quality

A good match is two people who are relevant to each other right now: one has what the other wants, they can actually find a time to talk, and there’s enough common ground for the conversation to be easy. Each of those is a piece of data. Relevance comes from goals and expertise, feasibility comes from logistics, and rapport comes from interests. If your survey misses one, your matches will consistently fail in that exact dimension, and you’ll be left wondering why intros aren’t landing.

Keep it short: completion rate beats completeness

The strongest predictor of program success isn’t how much you know about each member. It’s how many members you know anything about. A 25-question survey that 30% of members finish gives you a worse matching pool than a 10-question survey that 85% finish. Aim for something a member can complete in under five minutes: roughly 8 to 12 questions, of which only a handful are free text.

A useful filter for every question: would the answer change who I pair this person with? If not, cut it. You can always ask more later.

The question set

Basics and logistics

• “What time zone are you in?”
• “How often would you like to be matched: monthly, quarterly, or just once?”
• “How much time can you give a match: a 30-minute call, an hour, or async messages?”

These are your hard filters. At matching time they prevent the doomed pairings that no amount of shared interest can save: two people nine time zones apart, or an eager monthly networker matched with someone who only wanted a single intro. Logistics questions should be multiple choice so you can filter on them instantly.

Goals: what they want right now

• “What do you want to get out of this community right now?”
• “What’s the biggest thing you’re working on this quarter?”

This is the heart of the survey. The phrase right now matters: people join communities for one reason and stay for another, and a goal captured at signup two years ago is stale data. At matching time, goals let you pair people whose aims complement each other, the member hunting for their first hire with the member who’s built three teams, rather than pairing on surface similarity.

What they can help with

• “What topics could you talk about for an hour with no preparation?”
• “What do people usually come to you for advice about?”

Asking about expertise this way beats asking for a job title. Titles hide the interesting stuff: the marketer who’s great at pricing, the accountant who’s run four volunteer boards. At matching time, this section is the supply side of your marketplace, the pool of help you can route to whoever needs it.

What they want help with

• “What are you trying to figure out right now?”
• “If you could get an hour with any expert in this community, what would you ask about?”

The demand side. Crossing this section against the previous one is the single most reliable matching pattern there is: one member’s ask meets another member’s offer, and both people leave the call feeling the community works. Matches built on this complementarity get rated higher than matches built on similarity alone.

Interests and personal

• “What do you love doing outside of work?”
• “What’s a book, show, or podcast you’ve enjoyed lately?”

These look like throwaways, but they’re your rapport data and your tiebreakers. When two candidate pairings score equally on goals, the shared marathon habit decides it, and it gives the introduction email a warm, human opening line instead of a resume summary. They also feed the first five minutes of the call; if you want more of that, our icebreaker questions guide pairs well with this section.

Matching preferences

• “Who would you most like to meet in this community? (a role, an industry, a stage, or a specific kind of experience)”
• “Would you rather be matched with someone similar to you or different from you?”
• “Is there anyone here you’d prefer not to be matched with? (kept private)”

The avoid question feels awkward to ask and is quietly essential: direct competitors, former business partners, current coworkers. Honoring it invisibly is one of the biggest trust-builders a matching program has, and violating it once can end a member’s participation for good. Keep the answers confidential and never surface them to other members.

The open prompt

• “Anything else we should know when matching you?”

Always end with this. People volunteer things no structured question would have found: a career change in progress, a relocation, a topic they’re quietly expert in. Some of the best matches you’ll ever make start in this box.

Multiple choice or free text?

Use multiple choice for anything you filter on: time zone, availability, cadence, industry. It’s fast to answer and trivial to process. But don’t structure everything. Free text is where the best matching signal lives, especially if an AI or a human actually reads it. A dropdown says “marketing”; a sentence says “I’m rebuilding our email program after a failed agency engagement,” and that sentence is what makes a specific, delightful match possible. A good rule: multiple choice for logistics, free text for goals and expertise, and no more than four or five free text boxes total.

Keep profiles fresh

Goals go stale faster than any other field, and stale goals quietly degrade every match you make. You don’t need to re-run the whole survey. Every 6 to 12 months, send a light refresh with two or three questions: are you still interested in being matched, what are you working on now, and has anything changed about who you’d like to meet? Collecting the initial survey during onboarding, when motivation peaks, also does wonders for completion; see our member onboarding guide for where it fits.

Putting the answers to work

The survey is step one; the program around it, cadence, introductions, follow-up, is what turns answers into relationships. Our walkthrough on running a member matching program covers that end to end. And if you’d rather not manage profiles and pairing logic in a spreadsheet, this workflow is exactly what MemberMatch is built for: rich member profiles, custom AI matching criteria that read the free-text answers, and an approval step so you review every match before the introduction email goes out.