Seven Days of Getting Started with SurveyGizmo

This tutorial highlights features available in ALL account levels unless otherwise noted within the tutorial

Welcome to “Seven Days of Getting Started with SurveyGizmo.”

We’re going to guide you through creating your first survey, adding questions, publishing your survey, and creating reports to analyze the data you collect. You’ll also learn some advanced editing options, and how to reorder questions and pages. We will also introduce you to the email invitations features that start at the Personal Plan that will help you better track and receive higher response rates.

Day 1: Creating Your First Survey

1. Login to your SurveyGizmo Account

2. Click on one of the options to the right of Create a New (Survey, Quiz, Form, Poll– please see screen shot below)
3. Create Your Survey’s Title

When you start a new survey you will be asked to create a new Project Title. This is the internal title that it will be referred to while in the editor. You can later change this title or the Public Title that everyone else will know it by. All you have to do is go into the Current Project–>Survey Settings section on the right side of the Edit Survey tab and you can create separate titles for internal and public use. Be sure to name it accurately so you do not confuse your respondents!

4. Ownership

Users in SurveyGizmo can be assigned to multiple teams, so when you create a survey, you want to make sure you assign the survey to the appropriate team. Before moving forwar, please be sure to choose which team you’d like your survey to be apart of.

5. Select Survey Type.
Picking one of the Survey Types helps you customize questions and options for you later on in the survey creation process. Here you have three ways to get started -

• You can start with a Blank Survey and add your own questions.
• Or Copy an Existing Survey from a survey you have previously made.
• Picking one of the many Pre-Built Templates with pre-made questions is a proven way to save time in the survey creation process. Even with these pre-made questions, you are able to change, edit, delete, re-organize, and add questions anywhere you wish. Remember you can always take out questions that you don’t like.

6. Press Create Survey Now!

Congratulations! You have created your first survey. Pretty easy right? However it is not published yet so you do not have to worry about respondents taking a blank survey. We have some editing to do before publishing.

You are now on the editor page where we will fully customize your survey, including adding questions, themes, pages, logic and much more. This is home base for editing your survey.

You now want to change the theme and make your survey unique by clicking on the Change Themes section under the Publishing tab. Now you can see your current theme and other possible themes which you can preview them by clicking on the magnifying glass. It will open in a separate window so you see exactly what your respondent will see. Then you just have to press Save  to apply the theme.

After that you can click on the Dashboard tab on the top bar and it will take you home where you will see your newly created survey waiting for you when you return.

Tomorrow we’ll go through the variety of question types we offer (over 25!) as well as go through the steps of how to add questions to your survey. For now, play around in your survey and see what you can learn by yourself. As always- Happy Surveying!

Day 2: Adding Questions to Your Survey

Welcome back! This is Day 2 of your “Seven Days of Getting Started with SurveyGizmo.” Today we’re going to concentrate on how to add questions to your survey. We will also go over the many question types you have available to you. Continuing from yesterday you should go to the Editing tab with your survey.

1. Add a Question.
No matter which survey type you had chosen earlier (a blank survey, a survey template or a copy of the questions from a previous survey) the Add Question button in the bottom right corner is where you will always start with a new question.

2. Choose Question Type
You have 26 different question types to choose from here. We have everything from regular text boxes to special continuous sum and star rankings. The question types are broken down into five groups; Text Fields, Multiple Choice & Selected Items, Ordering & Ranking, Tables and Special Question Types.

 

• Text Field questions come in several varieties. You can use a simple Textbox for short answers, an Essay Box for longer answers, or a List of Text Boxes. Text fields also allow you specify data types like Date, Email, Currency, or Percentages.

 

 

• Multiple Choice & Select questions come in five varieties. This includes a Radio button or a Drop-Down Menu if you want your survey takers to only select one answer. If you want them to select more than one answer you should opt to use a Checkbox. You can also have them answer questions using our Image Choice. This allows your respondent to answer your question by picking one of your provided images, either single or multiple, depending on how many answers you want them to select.

 

 

• Ordering & Ranking questions also come in five different types. With the Likert Scale you can create your own scale to rank responses. If you want someone to rank your question from highest to lowest you can add either a Table Ranking or Drag and Drop Ranking. If you want them to give you a percentage that totals to 100% you would use a Continuous Sum Question. And if you want them to rank something on how much they like it according to stars (how you rate movies or books out of five stars) you would then use a Star Ranking Table..

 

 

• Tables provide a way to compile multiple questions and their sub-questions. All of these tables answer multiple questions including Table of Radio Buttons, Table of Dropdown Menus, Multi Dropdown, Table of Textboxes and Table of Checkboxes.

 

 

• Special Question types come in four varieties and were made specifically to handle more difficult questions. File Upload Option allows your users to easily upload things such as resumes, pictures, or Word documents. The Contact Group Question allows you to get a customer’s first name, last name, address, email, etc. all in one easy question. If you want the same effect as a contact information group, but want to add different question types then add a Custom Group or Custom Table.

**NOTE** For more information on Question Types, please check out: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/20734267-question-types

 

 

3. Your Question: What are you asking?

Here you type in the actual question you want your survey takers to answer.

4. Add Options
Depending on which question type you had picked earlier depends upon what type of options that are offered here. You are able to Require Questions here. For multiple choice questions you’ll be able to Add the Answers to your question here as well as Add Rows and Column Headers for table and matrix questions.

5. Click Add Question to Finish
In the bottom right corner you have the choice to either Add Question, Add and Edit Question or Add (current question) and Add Another Question. For now we will click the Add Question button. This choice is illustrated in the screen shot below.

6. Continue Adding Questions

7. Edit your Thank You page
Edit the Thank You text to make it more appropriate to your audience. By getting to the Thank You page the survey is marked as Completed. If your respondents don’t make it to the Thank You page they will be treated as a partial result, so make sure to drive people to that page.

That’s it for today! You’ve now learned how to create a survey and add questions to the survey. Stay tuned because tomorrow we’ll show you how to publish your survey and send it out to your survey takers!

Day 3: Publishing Your Survey

As you recall from yesterday, your survey has been created in the editor but is not yet published to collect responses. Today you’ll learn how to launch your survey in order to start collecting information by sending people the link to your survey, as well as embedding your survey into your website or blog.

Publishing Your Survey
Once you have all your questions in the survey, and modified your Thank You page, it is time to start the launch process by heading over to the Publishing tab. It will run you through the four critical pre-launch steps as seen below.

Pre-Launch Checklist

1. If you have not already previewed your survey, now is the time to make sure that it is asking what you want. By clicking Preview Survey you can preview it in a new window and take it as if you were the respondent.
2. Click the Run Diagnostics button to make sure that your survey passes the Complexity Fatigue Score, and Accessibility assessments. If any warnings appear it is not too late to go back and edit for simplicity
3. If you want to change your Current Theme last minute, click the Change Design button to take you to the theme page. 
4. The final steps of testing your survey are sending a Test Link and Generating Test Data. Confirm that your test link works by sending out a test email to up to 5 people, and have them confirm that they could access your survey. Whether it is your old college roommate or your Aunt, make sure it is accessible to everyone. On top of that you will also want to generate test responses to ensure that your survey has a 100% pass through rate to ensure that you can produce the charts and data sets you need to act on.

After these four steps you are ready to publish your survey. You see the green button, Launch It!

Congratulations, your survey is now published, but not automatically online. This protects your privacy. You decide where and when to share the links/embeds to your surveys.

Publishing Tab You are now back at the Publishing tab as seen below. Here you have the ability to customize the link that you send out to your survey takers or add an embedded campaign.

Alternate Link Styles
Click on the orange Web Link icon. From there you will be able to edit the name and choose what type of link you want it to be in the Link/Campaign Editor.

• Default Links are available to all users. You have the ability to customize the end text so survey takers have a better idea as to what the survey is about. This feature also allows you to organize your surveys better or make the link more understandable.
• Short Links are also available to all paid users. They are designed for email blasts because they are short and will not break because of long line wrapping.
• Branded Subdomains are available to Pro and Enterprise account users. This allows you to insert your brand into your survey, while having a short link, i.e. http://YourCompany.SurveyName.sgizmo.com.
• Secure Links are provided to our Enterprise account users. These allow you to host SSL surveys so that data is transmitted in an encrypted format between server and user.
• Private Domains are provided to our Enterprise account users. This feature allows you to publish surveys on your own website domain, i.e http://surveys.YourWebsite.com/SurveyName. This requires some coordinated setup by your system administrator and our support team.

 

Embedded Surveys
We have three different options for embedding a survey into your website or blog. These options include copying the JavaScript code (the preferred method as seen below), copying the iFrame code, or copying the actual HTML of the first survey page. With all these options you can really mess up your survey, so if you are not comfortable with HTML you might want some help from your web designer. And as always test, test, test!

Now that you’ve learned how to launch your survey we can now create Reports on all the data that you will start to collect. Time to harvest the fruits of your labor. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s lesson where we go over all your basic reporting needs.

Day 4: Analyzing Surveys with Reporting

Now that you have launched your survey, you most likely want to analyze the incoming responses. The Current Projects–>Reporting tab is the starting point for all reports and analysis. All accounts have access to our Summary Reports. Enterprise users have access to additional reports including TURF, Profile, Fall-Off, and Cross Tabulation. Now onto analyzing those surveys…

Available Report Types
Before you create a report you should figure out which report would best suit your needs (and if at first you don’t get the information you need– not to worry, you can create an unlimited number of reports!). You have six report types to choose from-

• Summary reports are available to all users and provide aggregate summaries of each question. The report will graph all or selected questions and provides many options you can set. Pro and higher level accounts receive even more configuration settings and the ability to filter data. Enterprise account get report scheduling, emailing, and website embedding.
• T.U.R.F reports are available at the Enterprise level and allow you to figure out the Total Unduplicated Research and Frequency of the answers that you have collected. This is useful when making business decisions based on multiple-choice/select-all type questions.
• Cross Tabulation reports are available at the Enterprise level and allow you to create grids of all your questions and answers.
• Fall-off reports can show you on what page people stop taking your survey in a visual manner. This will help you to determine what pages may need to be revised in your survey for future projects
  
• Profile Reports allow you to compare one respondent’s response to how the rest of respondents answered.

Creating a Report

After you have decided which report type you want to use, click on its icon and a new editor will open where you will see the various options for editing your report.

1. View your automatic report and all of your response data in the View Report tab to the left. Edit the Report Title by clicking on the title above with the pen icon. This way if you have similar report types you will know which one represents specific data.
2. In the Edit tab add items including Text, Headlines, Pie Charts, Vertical Bar Graphs, an Appendix, Tables, Cross Tabs, and Existing Report.
3. Create Filters (Pro and higher feature). Filters help weed out the information you don’t want in your report. Here you will see all the questions in your survey as well as the answer choices. You can then filter out questions by the answer that your respondents have given. You can add as many filters as you need to create a complete report. Learn even more about Filters.
4. Edit the Style of your report to bring your statistics to life. You can change the font type, color, size and also edit the background color scheme.
5. In the Publish/Share tab schedule an Automatic Delivery (Enterprise) of your report that can be sent to up to 5 people as a PDF on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
6. Remember to Save Changes in the bottom right corner!

Your Saved Reports
At the bottom of the page you can overlook all of your reports, including title, user creator, and any scheduled emails, file transfers or syndicated links. From here you can also export your data in Excel, Word and PDF or click the icons to edit, copy or delete the report.

Now you’re all set to analyze the data that you’ve collected. Stay tuned because tomorrow we’ll go into more Advance Features on question types.

Day 5: Advanced Edit Your Questions

Yesterday you learned how to create reports on all the information you were collecting from your respondents, but today we’re going to go back a few steps and show you how to use some of the advanced editing features SurveyGizmo offers you. We will go over advanced formatting, page randomization, question numbering, and show/hide triggers, among other things. But first we need to go back into the survey and into the editor page to play with the questions.

Question Editor
As we went over in Day 2: Adding Questions, the Question Editor is where any question adjustments occur. In this editor you are able to add some more advanced features like insert merge codes using the Simple Piping & Merge Code wizard, edit the question font size, insert an image from your File Library, change the text colors, basically do anything you would be able to do in Microsoft Word all condensed into this editor (see screen shot below.) The Question Editor is great for changes to a single question. If you want to change something for your entire page like page logic it is best done in your survey theme on the Current Project–>Survey Settings tab.

When you select a question to edit by clicking the pencil icon your edit options are divided into six separate tabs located on the left (Basic, Formatting, Validation, Advanced, Logic, Piping). From there we can make the necessary changes to edit our Option Title and Reporting Values and add a Show/Hide trigger for a question.

Option Editor
The options editor is the place where you are able to edit the answers to your questions, including the reporting values, edit a show/hide trigger, and add/edit your answers in bulk.

Question Title & Reporting Value

• You can edit the Option Title and Reporting Value for each question by clicking on the edit button on the pencil icon next to the answer. This will open in a separate window. Many users get confused over what the difference is between the Option Title and the Reporting Value. The Option Title is what survey takers see as the answer to the question. If you happen to have pushed your survey live and there was a misspelling in one of your answers, you can always change the option title, as opposed to the Reporting value. The Reporting Value is what our internal system uses to pull information for your reports, so once a survey is live, you never want to change this value. Your report graphs will also be far more readable with nice short reporting values. You can see examples of different Option Titles and Reporting Values below.

 

 

• The Show/Hide trigger option allows you to show or hide a question depending on the answer a survey taker has given. With this editing box you are able to select if an answer will trigger a show/hide question. Learn more about Show/Hide triggers with our Show/Hide Trigger tutorial.
• If you have your answers written in another document, such as Word or Excel, you can also upload a large amount of information using the Add/Edit in Bulk link.

 

 

Check out some of the other features that you can edit organized by the tabs in the Question Editor

1. Basic

• Change Question Type is pretty self explanatory and is there in case you’ve realized your don’t like the question type you have chosen, but don’t want to waste time deleting and re-creating a new question.
• Add instructional/description text

2. Formatting

• The Question Numbering option allows you to skip the numbering for a question. This is helpful when you are using the show/hide logic.
• Depending on the question type you have chosen you’ll see the ability to change the orientation of labels and options, as well as the number of columns for questions with many choices.
• You also have the ability to change the Max Words size, Width and Height
• Adding a Template Hook Name is only necessary if you want to use a custom CSS class to change how the question looks in your CSS style sheet.

3. Validation

• Make Question Required
• Change the minimum and maximum number of check boxes
• Here you are allowed to add your own Regular Expressionsjust like Google Analytics.
• Change formatting like currency or percentage.

4. Advanced

• Convert Question Typemakes it east to change the question type without wasting time deleting and re-creating a new question.
• Disable Questionwill remove the question from your survey, but retain the ability to report on its data.
• With a Short Name/Alias you can create a “nickname” for your question only seen by you.
• You can change the default value for your response including inserting a merge code.
• The Question Randomizer option allows you keep the question in order while randomizing the order of the other questions on the page. You can also make sure that the question is asked by default regardless of the randomly selected questions.

5. Logic

• Show/Hide Controls allow you to hide the question by default or depending on the previous answers.
• Show/When feature as shown before can be used to hide questions until the question before or based on previous responses using the Show When box on the bottom.

6. Piping

• Here a more advanced user can add Pipe Question to repeat a question or use Pipe Into Options to repeat your respondents options
• You can add a Dynamic Add-As-Needed button that dynamically “inserts” a new group of questions as many times (up to the max, if set) as the survey respondent needs.

Survey Settings

For general options that apply to your entire survey like page randomization or duplicate protection you can click on Survey Settings containing five tabs to the left (pictured below) (General, Save and Cont., Duplicates, Randomize, Advanced).

Here we will add in page randomization to reduce bias in your survey (assuming you have multiple pages in your survey).

1. 1. From the Current Project Page, select Survey Settings.
2. Open the Randomize Tab on the left.
3. Below you will see all of your pages listed with a textbox next to them.
4. Select the pages that you want shuffled for every individual survey. if you always want a page in the same order simply do not check its box.

 

Take some time to learn more of the advanced features. They can bring your survey to an entirely different level. Tomorrow we’ll learn about reordering questions and pages in your survey.

Day 6: Reordering Questions and Pages

On our second to last day we’re going to cover how to Reorder Questions within a page, reorder pages, as well as move questions from one page to another. And now onto reordering your questions and pages!

Reordering Questions Tab
Let’s say you’ve created all your questions and pages, but you’ve decided you don’t like where they are situated anymore. Not a problem! We have an entire tab dedicated to reordering questions and pages and even give you the option to move questions within a page or move them from one page to another.

• All you need to do to move a question within a page is click on the ‘Drag Me’ icon and move it to wherever you need it to go.
• Similar to moving a question within a page, you can move a question from one page to another by clicking on the ‘Drag Me’ icon and moving the question to another page. Note that you can not move questions to and from the ‘Thank You’ page because this is a special page and is treated differently. If you need to move a question across several pages and can not see them all in one view, simply move the question to an intermediary page, scroll the window and drag again, then save when you have finished.
• You are also able to move pages around in this tab. You can do this by clicking on ‘Drag Me’ icon next to the page title and move around this way. It is easiest to move pages around when you click hide questions first.

And that’s all there is to reordering you questions and pages! In our last email tomorrow we’ll cover the SurveyGizmo Email Invitation system.

Day 7: Email Invitations

Welcome to your final day of “Getting Started with SurveyGizmo.” Email invites are the most convenient way to send out survey links to your audience as well as track who has completed your survey. Email Invites become available at the Personal Plan and then has additional features like Reminders.

You begin an Email Campaign by going to the Publishing Tab and clicking on the envelope icon below.

Email Invite Campaign
Here is the overview of your campaign and your links.

Step 1: Campaign Info

Use a Campaign Name for your own organizational purposes, so in case you have more than one campaign you’ll know who you have sent the survey out to.

Step 2: Write Your Emails

Your campaigns are divided into three separate emails, the First Invite, Reminder Invites and Thank You messages. You can edit these messages by simply clicking the box.

1. First Invite

   Like any email, your invite email will include an editable subject, return address, from name and a body of text (optional but recommended). Personalize the message so your respondent is familiar with you and your survey. You can also create HTML content in the body.

1. Reminder Invites

   Customize your reminder invite by clicking on Send a Reminder Message. The layout is the same as your invite message, but make sure you edit it as a friendly reminder to your surveyor. Your survey link will be included so they do not have to go back to the first invite email.

2. Setup your ‘Thank You Message’

   Click on Setup your ‘Thank You’ Message to thank your respondent in a personal message, similar to the First Email and the Reminder invites format. However, since your respondent has already completed your survey, you do not need to add on a survey link.

You can also delete any of the three messages to simplify your campaign.

Step 3: Add Email Recipients

Once you’ve made sure your email is set up the way you want it to look, it’s time to Manage/Add Contacts you want to send your survey to. This is pretty simple– you can Add a Single Contact, Add in Bulk or Import from CSV/Excel from the Add/Import tab.

Step 4: Test & Send It

 

Similar to testing your survey link, you want to test your email invites. First add an email address of a friend by clicking Test Invitation and then Send Test. Once you have tested your email you can send out your campaign by clicking Send Now, but we highly recommend you have tested it out first.

Step 5: Monitor Your Progress

Once you have started your campaign and sent out invitations, you can track the progress by monitoring # Pending emails, # Sent, Last Send date and #Complete. Your email campaign is important to update and monitor to make sure that you are reaching the respondents you need.

Link Settings

In the Link Settings tab you can edit the link sent out in your emails, which is different from any link made in the web links section. This link will lead your respondent to the same survey, but has a different name for tracking purposes. Even after you have sent out your campaign you can return to the Advanced Link Controls to edit the options.

Here you can manually close the survey attached to your link once you have collected enough responses. You can also add a link protocol for security.

The Advanced Link Controls includes options like adding a quota, adding a Link Schedule for a beginning and end date of your survey, URL Variables, Language and a custom Close Message.

Thank you for taking our “Getting Started with SurveyGizmo” seven day email tutorial. If you want more in depth tutorials head on over to our tutorials page or sign up to take one of our live weekly webinars. Also look for more email tutorials to come!

Happy Surveying!

— The SurveyGizmo Team