This depends largely on the nature of the benchmarking survey that you are proposing.
If, for example, you provide a regular survey with regular participants (for example tracking KPI’s every quarter with well-organized members) then ‘open’ periods could be quite brief say 1-2 weeks at the end of the quarter. If the group are highly organised you can choose for no buffer period at all. It means results can be posted almost immediately on closure.
If on the other hand you are performing a yearly survey (for example a Fees Survey or Wages and Salaries Survey) with a large number of participants who are perhaps not quite so well organized then you may choose to leave the survey open for longer. Let’s say, for convenience, opening on 1st of the month and remaining open for the entire month closing on 30th . This could be followed by a planned buffer period of say 7-10 days. For large surveys BBS does need time to check that data inputs were correct, questions were answered correctly, identify irregular data and generally have a cleanup. So, we always factor in time for these anomalies to be identified and corrected.
Discuss this with a Benchmarking Solutions staff member – we have done this so many times before that we know what to expect for any survey you propose!