Many surveys you and your team create will have similar questions, particularly if you don’t use registration or use Unverified Participation for your surveys. In these scenarios, you will have to include demographic questions to use with Survey Analysis and reporting.
Instead of recreating these questions every time, you can create a master survey template and duplicate it when creating a new survey. Check out this video or read on for instructions:
A master template will help streamline your process in several ways:
If you don’t use registration with your site, or you use Unverified or Anonymous participation for your surveys, you can ensure that your survey responses always include the necessary demographic data.
Create choice questions with many options once, like a list of suburbs in your city or council, so your staff don’t have to input every option for each survey.
Copy commonly asked questions or formats, including sections, pages, or introductory content. This is particularly helpful if your organization uses a style guide that requires, for example, that all survey descriptions must be written in the same format.
Create a template for multi-page surveys to include demographic questions or Section Title and Descriptions in a consistent format. You may want to create a template for single-page surveys and an additional one for multi-page surveys.
One critical use case is to create a Dropdown question containing the suburbs or zip codes in your remit. Please note that Survey Analysis does not include the Suburb question as a filter. To report on response data based on suburbs, we recommend creating a Dropdown containing all relevant suburbs, postal codes, or zip codes and using that to filter by location. Utilizing this in the master template ensures that your project admins don’t have to create this for every necessary survey.
Create your survey template
You must ensure that your participants cannot visit the project housing the survey template while keeping it accessible to all necessary administrators. To create your template:
Create a new project to house the master template, but do not Publish it. By keeping the project in Draft, your participants won’t be able to access it. Project administrators added to the project can copy surveys.
Go to the Advanced tab of your project Settings and add all project administrators who need access in the Add Project Admin field. If an admin doesn’t have access to the project, they cannot clone the survey.
Create a survey, title it appropriately, and use the Details, Manage Questions, and Settings tab to configure your survey master template. You can keep the survey in Draft.
Clone the survey template as you create projects for your admins, or train all project administrators to clone the master template when creating a survey. After cloning, they can tailor the survey description and questions for the required purpose.
Site Administrators can also clone the survey when you create projects that require consistency, removing the need for project admins to clone the survey themselves. As a Site Admin, you can also check that the survey template is used across all necessary projects.
Ideas for questions to include
You may want to include:
A templated survey Description to give project admins a guide on what they should include. You can provide space for the purpose, background information, relevant links, or any other content your participant should have before undertaking a survey.
An Email question to provide a form of contact, although you should ensure you tell participants how their information will be used.
A Date question to collect their age or year of birth.
Choice questions, such as Radio Buttons, Checkboxes, or Dropdowns, to collect data about location, personal information, or their interests and relationships to your organization.
Section Title and Description questions to introduce multi-page surveys or educate participants about your privacy policies and terms of use. You may also find developing an additional survey template for long surveys with multiple pages helpful.