How to: Organise your surveys

Introduction

The Surveys Page is the home for all the surveys that have been built in an instance of SurveyOptic. Top-level information of surveys is displayed here and a selection of actions can be taken from this page to manage surveys. There are a number of tools on this page to assist in finding and organising surveys as an instance grows and accumulates surveys.

Tools to sort and filter surveys

The search bar

The surveys page has a search bar that searches survey titles and descriptions.

Use this search bar to filter to a specific survey or a group of similar surveys that use the same terms in their titles or descriptions. For example by including the term “Mental health” in the description of a series of surveys exploring the wider topic of mental health, all of these surveys could be easily found by typing “Mental health” into the search bar. A survey can also be found by entering a survey ID into this search bar.

Surveys page views

Filter the surveys page by selecting different views from the View menu. These views filter the surveys shown to help manage locating the desired survey(s).

Default : displays all the surveys you have access to (via permissions).

My surveys : displays all the surveys you have edited and have access to (via permissions).

Draft : displays only the surveys in draft status you have access to (via permissions).

Open : displays only open surveys that you have access to (via permissions).

Closed : displays only the closed surveys that you have access to (via permissions).

Archived : displays only the archived surveys that you have access to (via permissions).

Deleted : displays only the surveys marked for deletion that you have access to (via permissions).

Related surveys:

Filter the surveys page by a desired template, using the Template filter. Surveys that have been created from the selected template will all be displayed. Alternatively where surveys have been created from a template or copied from an existing survey, this information is listed on the survey tile. Clicking this text will apply a filter to the surveys page, only displaying the surveys that are related in this way. In this view searches and tag filters can be applied as normal. Select [Clear] to clear the filter.

An alternative way of viewing surveys based on a particular template is found on the templates page. Clicking the [view surveys] button will load the surveys page with a filter applied to display only the surveys which are related to the template.

Tags

Survey tags can be added to surveys in the survey editor by clicking and typing tags into the [+ new tag] lozenge. Multiple tags can be added to a single survey. When adding a tag to a survey that is already in use, SurveyOptic will display a clickable prompt for easy completion of the tag.

These survey tags will appear on the surveys page, both on survey tiles and at the top of the page. Select [Tags] on the surveys page to select the tags you wish to filter the surveys page by. The list of surveys will be filtered to display only those surveys that share the selected tags. Tags attached to surveys are also displayed on their survey tiles. The surveys page can also be filtered by clicking any of these tags. Select [Clear filters] or select the highlighted tags to clear the tag filter.

This can be a very effective way of grouping surveys together, gathering all relevant surveys in one place. There is also a tag labelled “untagged”, clicking this will display all the surveys that have no tag assigned to them.

Survey tile ordering

Use the order menu to select the order survey tiles are displayed on the surveys page. select from "Last updated", "Title", "Close date" and "Open date". This can be used at the same time as applying filters to the surveys page.

Archive

When a survey is no longer required to be shown or interacted with (for example all reporting has been completed) you may wish to [Archive] the survey. Doing so will label the survey as archived and hide it from most views on the surveys page. This is an effective way of keeping the surveys page tidy, ensuring only current surveys are shown. Archived surveys retain all of their data and can generate reports as normal. Archived surveys can be searched for and viewed when using the archived view.

Delete:

When a survey is no longer required for any purpose, you may wish to [Delete] the survey. Doing so will mark the survey as deleted and hide it from view on the surveys page. Deleted surveys can be searched for and viewed when using the deleted view. Deleted surveys remain on the system for the default deletion period, after which point they will be ‘hard deleted’ from the system.