Getting Started with SurveyGizmo Stage 1: Creating Your First Survey 1. Open SurveyGizmo site (http://www.surveygizmo.com) Log in 2. Click on Create Survey (see screen shot below) 3. Create Your Survey s Title This will be the title the public sees as well as the internal title you use in SurveyGizmo (see screen shot below). Be sure to name it something that describes the survey accurately. Once you have created the survey, you do have the ability to change the title. All you have to do is go into the Advanced Options tab and you can create separate titles for public and internal use.
4. Select Survey Type. Picking one of the Survey Types helps us customize questions and options for you later on in the survey creation process. Here you have three ways to get started - Picking one of the many Survey Templates with predefined questions is a proven way to save time in the survey creation process. Even with these predefined 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. You can also start with a Blank Survey and add your own questions Or Copy the Questions from an survey you have previously made. 5. Pick a Theme. Here you are able to preview all the theme types that come along with the survey type you picked in the previous step. If you can t decide on one theme right away, don t worry! You can change it whenever you want by going into the Look & Feel of your survey and picking a new one. 6. Create Your Survey. Congratulations! You have created your first survey.
Stage 2: Adding Questions to Your Survey 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. 1. Add a Question. Depending upon which survey type you had chosen earlier (a blank survey, a copy of the questions from a previous survey, or a survey template) will decide how you will add your first question. The screen shot below shows you what you will see if you start with a blank survey. From there all you need to do is click the Add a question button. Alternatively, the screen shot below is an example of where you can go to add a question if you already have questions in your survey. This is also the screen you will see if you start with a copy of a previous survey or a pre-made survey template. 2. Choose Question Type You have 20 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 four groups; text fields, multiple choice/ selected items, ordering/ranking, and special question types.
Text Field questions come in four varieties. You can use a simple Textbox for short answers, an essay box for longer answers, or Multiple text boxes. Text fields also allow you specify data types like Date, Email, Currency, or Percentage from the Question editing Page. Multiple Choice questions come in nine varieties. This includes a Single select 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 could opt to use a Checkbox question, Table/Matrix of radio buttons, Drop-down menus, Checkboxes, or a Multiple Drop-down menu list. You can also have them answer questions using our Image Selector as well as allow them to rate something using a Rating scale (Likert scale). Ordering/Ranking questions come in three varieties. If you want someone to rank your question from what they like the most to what they like the least you can add a Ranking question. 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 (think how you rate movies or books out of five stars) you would then use a Star ranking table. Special Question types come in four varieties and were made specifically to handle more difficult questions. The Contact information question allows you to get a customer s first name, last name, address, email, etc. all in on 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 Matrix question type. You will also find the File upload option under this category so your users can easily upload things such as resumes, pictures, or word documents. 3. Add a Question Title 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 to you 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 row and column heading titles for table and matrix questions.
5. Click Add Question to Finish Here you have the choice to either return to the survey editor, add another question, or go into the advanced editing options for the question you just created (we ll go deeper into the advanced options for individual survey questions on Day 5 of this tutorial). Once you ve decided on what you want to do next then click the add question button. This choice is illustrated in the screen shot below. NOTE: The Advanced Editing page contains LOTS and LOTS of additional options! 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 pagethey will be treated as a partial result, so make sure to drive people to that page.
Stage 3: Publishing Your Survey Now we ll learn how to launch your survey, send people the link to your survey, as well as learn how to get the code to embed your survey into things such as your website or blog. Publishing Your Survey Once you have all your questions in the survey, modified your Thank You page, and previewed it to make sure you like the way it looks, you can then head over to the Publishing tab and click on the Launch Your Survey Now button as seen in the screen shot below. Alternate Link Styles When you push the Launch button on your survey, you will then see a screen like the one shown in the screen shot below. Here you have the ability to customize the link that you send out to your survey takers depending on what type of account you have. Note, none of these links are published anywhere to the web automatically. This protects your privacy. You decide where and when to share the links to your surveys. 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.
Advanced Publishing- Embedded Surveys We have three different options for embedding a survey into your website, blog, etc. These options include copying the JavaScript code (the preferred method), 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!
Stage 4: Analyzing Surveys with Reporting All accounts have access to our Summary Reports and Profile Reports. Enterprise users have access to additional reports including TURF, Satisfaction meters, Cross Tabulation, and Combined Summaries. Now on to creating and 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. Combined Summary reports are available at the Enterprise level and allow you to combined survey data collected from two or more surveys.these work great for combining multi-language surveys. Cross Tabulation reports are available at the Enterprise level and allow you to create grids of all your questions and answers. 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. Satisfaction Meters are available at the Enterprise level and allow you to measure the satisfaction or other form of happiness scale of each of your survey respondents.
Creating A Report After you have decided on which report type you want to use, you would then click on that report type and a new window will open where you will see all your various options for creating a report. 1. Add a Report Title and decide on what Date Range you d like your report to pull from. Date Ranges are helpful in comparing different months or years of data. 2. 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. 3. Select Questions to include in your report. Similar to adding filters, this allows you to see only certain questions in your report, but gives you all the answers to that question. 4. Add Options to your reports. Here you can add appendices, graphing details, question options, statistic details, response variations, URL variables and source, and adjust user permissions. 5. Schedule (Enterprise) a re-occurring report that can be sent up to 5 people as a pdf on a hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis. 6. Copy the code that allows you to Embed the report into a website, blog, or intranet (Enterprise Feature). 7. Save and create the report!
Browse All Responses Under this tab you are able to browse through all the responses you have received individually. Data Management Options Under this tab you can Clear All Responses to the survey (be careful because once you clear them you can t get them back!). You can also Close Partial Responses to your survey meaning that anyone who has submitted a partial response will now be treated as a completed response. Learn more with our Clearing Responses tutorial.
Stage 5: Advanced Edit Your Questions 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. Advanced Question Editor You are able to get to the advanced question editor in two ways. The first way is when you add a question, right before you add it, you have the options to either return to the survey editor, add another question or go into the advanced editing options for the question (shown in the screen shot below). The other option is to go into the advanced features through the survey editor. To do this click on the notepad icon next to an already added question (see example below) Both of these options will bring you to the advanced question editor page. From there you will be able to edit and customize your questions. Question Title Editor As we went over in Day 2: Adding Questions, the question title is the actual question that you ll be asking. In this editor you are able to 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 Editor is great for changes to a single question. If you want to change a setting for all your questions at the same time that is best done in your survey theme on the Look & Feel page.
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. Many users get confused over what the difference is between the Item Title and the Reporting Value. The Item 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 item title, as opposed to the Reporting value. The Reporting Value is what our internal system uses to pull information for your reports, son 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. Short reporting values also make managing advanced logic easier.you can see an example of different Titles and Reporting Values below. The Other Textbox option allows your survey takers to write in an answer to your question. 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. Advanced Formatting The Advanced Formatting option allows you to do a variety of things to customize your questions even further. Here you can change things from the look and feel of the questions to the question type (in case you change your mind after you ve created your question). 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. Here depending on the question type you have chosen you ll see the ability to change the orientation of labels and options, change the default value, change the minimum and maximum number of check boxes, as well as the number of columns for questions with many choices.
Misc Options The Randomize Options button allows you to randomize the answers in your question to reduce bias. The Page Randomizer option allows you keep the question in a stationary place while randomizing the other questions on the page. The show/hide controls allow you to dynamically show or hide a question depending on an answer previously given. Read about Show/Hide. The Question Numbering option allows you to skip the numbering for a question. This is helpful when you are using the show/hide logic. You also have the ability to change the TextBox Size and change formating like currency or percentage. 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 stylesheet. Validation Here you are allowed to add your own Regular Expressions just like Google Analytics. Advanced Logic & Piping Here a more advanced user can add Piping logic to repeat a question or Show/When logic to control whether a question is shown or not. We hold advanced webinars on survey logic where we go into these topics ingreater detail.
Stage 6: Reordering Questions and Pages We now learn how to Reorder Questions within a page, reorder pages, as well as move questions from one page to another. 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 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 and hide all your 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.
Stage 7: Email Invitations Email invites are the most convenient way to send out survey links to your audience as well as track who has completed. Email Invites become available at the Personal Plan and then has additional features like Reminders and Spam Score checking at the Pro Level. Email Invites: Summary Info Here you Create a Title for your own organizational purposes, so in case you have more than one email invite list you ll know who you re sending the survey out to. This is also where you select what type of link you are sending out to your survey takers. You have two options to choose from: the Save & Continue link or the Completely New Survey Link. The Save & Continue link is available at the Pro and Enterprise levels and allows your survey takers to click a save button in the middle of taking your survey. Once they click the button the survey link will automatically save their answers and take them back to where they left off. The link that Creates a Completely New Survey is good for surveys that are one or two pages long and survey takers will most likely complete in one session. These links are available to all users. Email Message 1. Creating the email message is simple. All you need to do is click on the Add Content button to start creating. Don t forget to choose between sending a plain text email or a combination HTML and plain text message. Also it s important to note that you need to keep the merge code for your survey link in there! 2. Once you ve added the content to you email you should always Preview it! If you decide to use the HTML and plain text message, be sure to preview both ways no one wants to send out a less than professional email. 3. Once you ve made sure your email is set up the way you want it to look, it s time to Add the Contacts you want to take your survey. This is pretty simple you can upload your contacts from an Excel/CSV file, copy and paste in bulk, or add each contact one at a time.
4. Now that you have your contacts uploaded, you can go back to the email you wrote and click the Send button and your email will be sent out. 5. Now let s say that a week goes by and about half the people who you sent the link to still haven t filled out your survey, well the great thing about email invites is you have the option to send them an Email Reminder. All you need to do is add a reminder, create a new email and send it out! How easy is that? 6. Want to add an email thank you note after your survey takers finish? All you need to do is click the Add a Thank You button and create and email thanking your survey takers. This will now be automatically sent when your survey takers are done taking the survey. Now you re a Email Invite expert!