How To Decide On A Baby Name Using Surveys

“I don't care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right.” - George M. Cohan

A name is a very powerful thing.

They carry weight and meaning behind each letter, and they can be a deeply personal part of our history. A name can carry a family’s heritage, honor a loved one, or serve as inspiration to those yet to grow old. They can be spoken with love, or shouted with fervor. We carry them with us throughout our lives.

In order to avoid being lost in a sea of overwhelming choice, it’s important to decide early on what matters to you when choosing a name for your unborn children:

• Are you someone who values tradition, or the unique and inspired?
• Do you want something that can be adapted into a shorter nick-name, or stand on its own?
• Are you looking for something masculine/feminine, or unisex?
  

With the importance we as a society place on names, choosing baby names for your little one can feel like a daunting, overwhelming effort. Getting outside feedback from the Helpfull community is a great way to narrow down your baby-name list; unique insight from other parents can shine a new light on names you hadn’t yet considered.

In just a few quick and simple surveys, you can gather hundreds of pieces of advice on your favorite names for your child-to-be. Before starting our surveying process, we will first take a look at:

What to Look for in a Baby Name

A survey conducted by mumsnet.com of UK parents found that 25% of them would choose a different name for their child, if they were given the chance.

The reasons to regret naming your child range from issues of popularity (finding out later the name was far too common) to pronunciation difficulties; in some cases, the name just simply doesn’t fit right for the child.

In order to make sure you’re choosing a first name for your child that has the cultural longevity to last throughout the child's life, it’s vital to hear from other parents; getting outside opinions from other families or a family member helps us to keep an open mind. Taking names from pop culture can be a boon, or a disservice - depending on how our chosen piece of media ages in later years.

This advice can also serve in warning against particular names or naming conventions. It’s always better to learn from someone else’s mistake than our own. To help new parents, we’ve developed some general tips to consider when selecting potential names for you short-list:

1. Consider the meaning behind your child’s name. Even if you’re not a sentimental person, traditional names often carry historical meaning; if you’re not careful, this could have a detrimental impact on how your child views their name later on in life.
2. Keep it short. Short names are often easier to spell and pronounce, and will save your child lots of effort when filling out documents later on in life.
3. Consider potential nicknames. Names like “Jackson” and “Elizabeth” offer many ways to be shortened, whereas names like “Adam” and “Clara” don’t.
4. Check your ideas against name-ranking websites. Websites like babycenter.com offer new parents a way of ranking recent popularity of baby names; having this information is useful when considering if your child should have a common name, or a unique name.
5. Fit the first name to your last name. Check your name ideas to see how well they sound when spoken in front of your family name. Some ideas are going to stand out more than others, and we can avoid naming our child with a name that is too common (i.e. John Smith) or leaves them with a potentially embarrassing set of initials (Peter Ellen Ellis).

With this advice in mind, we’re ready to develop our list of preferred names.

Once the Helpfull community has had a chance at choosing a baby name, we can move into chiseling down this list into the perfect baby name.

Survey #1 - Initial Ideas

To showcase how Helpfull’s text-comparison surveys can be used to get valuable feedback on your baby-names, we’ve conducted a series of polls that test the most popular baby names of 2020 - both for boys and girls.

For baby boys, our initial eight test names: Liam, Noah, Jackson, Aiden, Elijah, Grayson, Lucas, and Oliver.

For baby girls, our initial eight test names: Sophia, Olivia, Riley, Emma, Ava, Isabella, Aria, and Aaliyah.

Each survey was sent out to a group of 100 Helpfull pollsters. In less than a half-hours time, the Helpfull community had made their voices heard - and their favorite name was chosen.

                                                                                                                   Baby Boy Names - Test One Results

                                                                                                                  Baby Girl Names - Test One Results

However you may want to extrapolate results from these votes is entirely up to you; for our purposes, we want to take only the top four names from each round of polling. For boys, the names Oliver, Liam, Jackson, and Lucas stood out at the top; for girls, our top four became Olivia, Ava, Riley, and Aria.

Before we move into the second stage of votes, we want to take a look at the dozens of insightful comments and advice given by the Helpfull community.

                                                          Baby Boy Name Feedback     Baby Girl Name Feedback

Our Helpfull pollsters were willing to give us advice on a variety of subjects related to naming our child, including: the ability to shorten the name, the etymology behind our choices, and anecdotes pertaining to those they admired who shared names with one of our selections.

Survey #2 - The Final Contenders

With our list refined down to just four choices, we’re able to move onto a second round of testing.

We’ve had one chance to test our name ideas in front of an audience; getting yet another helps us to further refine our list into our top two choices. By gathering a diverse set of opinions, we’re moving closer towards our goal of finding the best name for our little one..

Just twenty minutes after submitting our survey, we’re treated to two completed polls. This time, we’re looking to cull another two name ideas off each list - leaving us with our final set of choices to consider in the last survey.

                                                                                                               Baby Boy Names - Test Two Results

                                                                                                                Baby Girl Names - Test Two Results

One more round of voting behind us, and we’re down to the wire. Our final two choices for our hypothetical son are either Jackson or Oliver - both strong, masculine names with lots of potential for a nick-name. For our daughter, we’re left with two equally beautiful choices to consider - Olivia, and Aria.

      Baby Boy Name Feedback    Baby Girl Name Feedback

Were we to continue drafting new ideas for our lists, the Helpfull community has many suggestions for us to pull from. Many comments piggy-packed off of the name Olivia to suggest a simpler “Olive” - a name that denotes peace and harmony. Many parents suggested “Elizabeth”  on the basis of it being a similarly regal first name, and easy to shorten.

Survey #3 - The Perfect Name

How exciting - we're down to our very last test!

One last set of surveys, and we’ll have successfully crowd-sourced our final name choices. To get a larger sample of polling data, we upped the limit for polling responses from 100 to 200 - ensuring we’ll get one last hearty batch of comments to consider.

                                                                                                          Baby Boy Names - Final Test Results

                                                                                                         Baby Girl Names - Final Test Results

After shopping our list of ideas to a total of 400 unique pollsters - and with the voter’s confidence on our side - we’re able to finally settle on a name for our respective children. These names will follow us through our family tree. Jackson and Aria are names we can trust will be well-received by their peers, their future work colleagues, and hopefully - themselves.

Choosing The Perfect Baby Name with Helpfull Feedback

Choosing a name for your child is a daunting - but extremely rewarding task. With Helpfull surveying, my family - and yours - can receive quick, measured feedback from a community of our peers; feedback that can be used to guide our decision-making process in a way that makes sense, and is backed by outside research.

An intuitive user-interface, coupled with the ability to gather hundreds of responses from the public in just minutes, are just a few of the features that make Helpfull the ultimate tool for any artist, designer, marketer, or parent.

No matter what name you choose for your child, we're thrilled we could be a part of your beautiful journey.

And hey - if at the end of the day, you're not sure about letting strangers choose your next baby's name - consider using surveys for their middle name! You just might be surprised by the results.

When making the choices that matter most, turn to the Helpfull community - sign up with Helpfull today!

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