Tips for Designing Surveys

Surveys can be an extremely effective community engagement tool. You can use them to collect qualitative and quantitative data and use the Survey Analysis reporting tool to understand community sentiment and preferences.

However, surveys shouldn’t be treated as a quick activity to tick off your engagement list; they are only effective when well-designed and used thoughtfully.

A large element of good survey design is writing engaging and relevant questions, but EngagementHQ surveys contain various features to build surveys and help you get the information you require for community engagement outcomes.

Conditional logic shows questions based on the answer to a prior question. It is used to create branching within a survey and only show or hide questions if they are relevant to the respondent.

For example, a yes or no radio button question asking, “Did you enjoy the engagement process?” would have conditional questions based on the following answers:

Conditional questions work through a hierarchy with parent and child questions. You can also have conditional questions that stem from other conditional questions, allowing you to create deeper survey branching.

Create different routes for survey respondents using skip logic to skip to specific questions or pages. Implementing skip logic ensures that your participants only see relevant questions based on previous answers, reducing time spent on the survey and creating a better user experience.

You can apply skip logic to drop-down or radio button questions and choose to skip respondents to another question, another page, or the end of the survey. For example, you ask, “Are you a resident or business owner in Council?” and the respondent answers are:

As skip logic is always applied at the end of the current page, it is best to apply it to the last question on the page.

Add a file upload question to your surveys to enable your community to submit files, such as:

We recommend providing file type and size specifications in the question notes; EngagementHQ supports files up to 200 MB and various file types, but you may want to add your own restrictions. When deciding on the size limit, please note that larger files take longer to upload, which could become a friction point.

You can manage submitted files via the Submissions Manager.

The Section Title and Description element lets you introduce and explain questions in your survey. This is especially helpful when you have multi-page surveys and want to introduce sets of questions to provide context or additional information.

Sections also include Code View, which allows you to paste in HTML elements, such as videos, images, or interactive media.

A likert scale question is a rating scale against a range of statements. You can add various statements and rating options (a 5-point scale is common, but 7 provides more granular analysis) and respondent will rate each statement using the scale.

Because they are highly flexible, you have complete control over your statements and the scale you choose for your project. Likert questions are perfect for satisfaction surveys and research-based engagement methodologies.

If you include an Emoji question in your survey, you can embed it into emails or newsletters to encourage participation and reach a wider audience.

You can embed these into EngagementHQ newsletters, third-party platforms, govDelivery bulletins, or OpenForms emails. When respondents select an answer, they are linked to the complete survey in their browser.