Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

If you’ve ever felt like your organization could be doing some things better, now’s the time to find out what your members really think. Today, we’re walking through how to create a survey.

The survey tool is under Communications > Survey Manager. But before we create our first survey, we’ll go into the settings and we’ll set up another saved question. Within the Survey Questions area here, we have different standardized types of answers that someone would select from when completing the survey. For example, a scale of Agree Strongly to Disagree Strongly. Or Exceeded Expectations to Did Not Meet Expectations.

These different standardized survey answers are built in, but if we need some more, we can create our own. Click on the Copy button for the set of answers that most closely matches the new set of answers you’ll be creating. After copying, edit your copy.

I’m setting up a one-to-five rating scale. Now that I have this set of answers, which I’ll be using all through my survey, I’ll go to Survey Manager to start setting that up. At the top, I’ll click to add a new survey. My survey gets a name, and then a description. This description is introductory text that will appear at the top of the survey. I’m creating a general survey that isn’t tied to any particular meeting, but a very common use of this tool is to gather attendee feedback after an event. I’ll put in my start date and my ending date. After the end, this survey will no longer be available. I don’t have an associated meeting, but if this were a meeting-related survey, we’d select the associated meeting here.  My questions can show either to the left of the answers, or above them. You can also choose to display the survey results on the front end of the website. With the box unchecked as it is now, only admins will be able to see the responses. If you’d like to make them public, you can choose to display the results to everyone, or only to people who have already taken the survey. I’m going to keep these results private, and I also want to include the security image. This helps ensure that the responses we get are from real humans, rather than spambots.

In the Restrictions section, we can choose to make this survey anonymous, or to not allow duplicates. We can also make the survey invitation only. If we choose this option, we’ll email the survey out to our contacts. The link that appears within that email will be the only way for someone to get into this survey to complete it. Alternatively, we can restrict access to this survey. For example, this may be a survey about our student membership program. We may be soliciting specifically for feedback from the students, rather than mentors and program leaders.

On the next screen, we’ll start building out our survey. When I add a question, I get a few options.

• I can solicit a text answer. The person filling out the survey will write in their response.
• A paragraph text answer. This is the same as the text answer, but with more space.
• A list of checkboxes. The person can select one or more items that they’re interested in.
• A list of radio buttons. From the list that appears, the person can select only one answer.
• Or a drop-down list. Similar to the radio buttons, but with a more compact display.

The layout options that we have are:

• Comments, which are for comments from us to the respondent, not a question they’ll answer.
• Or a section header, used for breaking up a longer survey.
  
  

I’m going to use the radio buttons with the saved question I created earlier, with my rating scale. I want to know what our members think about our educational offerings, with an extra note saying that 5 is the highest rating. I’m not going to make this answer required although I can. If I needed to add another option—perhaps this question doesn’t apply to everyone—I can do that here. Then I’ll save my question.

Let’s add another. I’ll use paragraph text this time. If we wanted to solicit extra feedback in relation to a multiple choice question, we’d add a separate question using the Text type. If someone rates us a 1 on educational offerings, we may want to know why. We can either do that individually, or we might add a text or paragraph text question to the end.

Once your questions have all been created, use the Sort button to rearrange them. On the next screen, we have the Thank You message.

And on the final All Done screen, we have a link to our survey as well as a recap with Edit buttons.

Now that the survey’s been created, we’ll want to send that to our contacts. We can either go into Email Manager, or from Survey Manager in the main list, you can use the Email Button, which is a shortcut that will take you straight into Email Manager. For more details on sending out emails, as well as targeting your emails for specific respondents, please see our video walkthrough on the Email Manager.

Let’s take a look at the survey itself. If I’m a member who has recently received a survey invitation, I’ll click on the link and I’ll land here, with the name of the survey, the introduction or description, and the questions. None of these questions are actually required, so I could hit the Submit button now. But in order to show you what the results will look like, I’ll fill in the details.

After filling in my answers, I’ll click Submit. I’ll receive a Thank You message for this particular survey, and a button to go back to the survey list. If any other surveys are currently active, I’ll see those listed here. Now, to hop back into the admin area to take a look at the survey responses.

In my list of surveys, I’ll find the Annual Membership survey and click on the View Results button. With this being a very small sample size, everything’s breaking out to 100%. But if we received more feedback from our members, we’d see a percentage breakdown of how the different ratings are coming in.

We can look at the feedback in different ways. This view shows everything by question, with the percentage breakdown. Since every answer on a text question is going to be unique, and the same thing goes for paragraph text, those answers aren’t listed here. But they are visible if you go to view the results by respondent.

We can view the details on any particular person who answered the survey to see exactly what they wrote. We can also view chart breakdowns of the responses. We have 100% here, but this pie chart may break down differently depending on the feedback that you’ve gotten from your respondents.

And that’s it for the survey tool.

Once you know what your chapter members are really thinking, you’ll be able to make improvements to better serve your members and your board.