How to: Re-using questions, sections and surveys

Introduction

SurveyOptic has several tools to help you re-use existing material. This can be useful for several reasons:

• convenience
• data comparison
• data aggregation

This guide will explain how to re-use material and its applications.

Convenience

It is not uncommon to use similar or identical questions and sections across different surveys. One example would include a demographic question set that is re-used in multiple surveys. Perhaps a set of standard questions which are used in every survey of that type or theme. Another example might be a ‘question bank’ with commonly used questions which are used for similar surveys deployed across different organisations. In this way, ‘standard’ questions can be quickly incorporated whilst also allowing users to ‘tailor’ the survey to the organisation/situation. Some of the methods to re-use questions in this way make use of Templates so we will first cover this.

Creating a template

Creating a template is simple to do. A template is created from a survey. You can start from a “blank survey” and build your question set or if you have a survey already built that contains your desired questions a template can be created from there. Please refer to the “SurveyOptic – Survey Editor” and “How To - Create a Survey and add Questions” for more information on the survey editor.

1. Once your survey has the desired questions built, select [Create template] to create a template based on the survey. Created templates inherit questions, title, and description from the survey. Once clicked, a message will display reading 'Template created successfully'.
2. Find your newly created template in the Templates page.

Copying a question

Individual questions can be copied from a template, survey or audience.

1. Add a new question to a survey in the survey editor and click on the [Copy from] button.
2. Select template, survey or audience as the source type and then find the desired source from the menu. Typing into the box will narrow down the list.
3. Select the desired question and select [Copy] to add the question to the survey.

Copying a section

Sections can be copied into surveys either from a template, survey or audience using the same steps as copying questions.

1. Add a new question to a survey in the survey editor and click on the [Copy from] button.
2. Select template, survey or audience as the source type and then find the desired source from the menu. Typing into the box will narrow down the list.
3. Select the desired section and select [Copy section] to add the section and all the questions within it into your survey. Alternatively, select the [Copy] button to copy only the section heading into your survey.

Note: prefill settings are not copied over from the template/survey (whether the question is a prefill-question or prefill-answer). If the question(s) are to be used as prefills in the new survey they will need to be marked as such.

Creating a survey from a template

Complete surveys can be created from templates. Surveys will inherit all of the questions, and settings of the template.

1. To create a survey from a template, select [Create survey] on the desired template tile in the Templates page.
   
   
2. The survey editor will launch with a survey that matches the template. Make any desired edits (such as open and close dates) then select [Create survey] to create the new survey.
3. The new survey will appear in the Surveys page and will note the template it is based on in the survey tile upon clicking the survey title.

Copying a survey

An exact copy of a survey can be created directly from the surveys page.

1. Locate the desired survey on the Surveys page and select [Copy] on the survey tile.
   
   
2. A pop-up will appear with options to “create a follow-on copy” or “create a new, unlinked copy”. Select the appropriate option.
3. The survey editor will open with the question set, description and title of the copied survey (with a timestamp in the title referring to time of copy)

Data comparison

Surveys with questions that share question id’s can be compared in the SurveyOptic data reporting tools. All surveys that have been created from templates will share question id’s of matching questions. Similarly if a survey has been copied from another, the questions will share question id’s. Also, a copied follow-on survey will automatically set its Previous Survey to the survey it was copied from, making comparisons easy.

Here we can see a series of likert questions compared, with the current results on the right hand side and the previous survey results on the left. In this example positive sentiment change has been enabled showing the change from the previous survey.

If the Previous Survey survey has not been set in a survey, it can be selected using the Advanced tab in the survey editor.

1. Navigate to the Advanced tab in the desired survey.
2. Select the desired Previous Survey to compare the current survey with using the menu. Typing into the box will narrow down the list.
   
   
3. Once selected, the Previous Survey will automatically load in the dynamic report.

Data aggregation

Templates can also be used to aggregate data from multiple surveys. This can be useful where multiple surveys have been deployed, say across multiple teams or departments in an organisation, SurveyOptic can aggregate the data across these surveys for a “whole organisation” analysis. Another use case would be analysing common data groups across surveys. For example using templates to re-use a demographic question set across multiple surveys will then allow for analysis of the demographic spread across the many surveys.

1. To view the aggregate report, select [Template Report] button on the desired template tile on the templates page.
2. The familiar reports page will load, with the dynamic report selected as default. From here the aggregate reporting for the template can be viewed and downloaded.