EngagementHQ enables community leaders to select the appropriate combination of tools for each phase of a project’s life cycle. This tailored approach carries into the design of our Survey tool which provides a range of questions and settings to suit your organisation's goals for a survey. The Survey tool is user friendly enough to be used on iPads during live events, advanced enough to be used alongside statistically valid surveys, and versatile enough to be used as a form, petition, or application. Creating a tailored survey is as simple as selecting question types, entering information, and selecting settings. Through the strategic use of settings, our survey tool may be shaped to suit any context. Let's briefly explore ten settings and features to consider when creating a survey.  

#1 - Survey Cloning

Creating a survey from scratch is optional thanks to survey cloning. Your library of personalised templates grows with each and every survey drafted on your EngagementHQ site. 

# 2 - Participation types

Selecting between four participation types helps tailor a survey to a wide range of use cases.

• Allowing anyone to participate increases response volume and is ideal if you’ll be tabling in-person events.
• Unverified participation allows anyone to contribute, however, an email address and screen name are required. This keeps the barrier to entry low and is best when you'd like to follow up with participants via email, or need participants to accept the terms of use for your site. 
• Restricting submission to registered site users produces the most robust data, promotes site registration, and reduces the need to ask demographic questions (as these will already be stored in your PRM and available within reporting). 

#3 - Add relevant media

Adding the section title and description element allows you to easily add images, rich text, and tables as well as videos or HTML code between or above any question. Learn more about adding media to a survey.

This example is from Connect Sammamish and does a nice job of using rich media to inform participants of the project before they begin the survey. Watch a conversation with City staff discussing this transportation project and survey.

#4 - Create Multiple Page Surveys

  If you prefer to deliver your surveys one question at a time, survey pages are for you. Creating and arranging new pages is visual and intuitive. The order of survey pages, questions within a page, and the options within a question may be changed by dragging and dropping to reorder. Moving questions from one page to another is easily accomplished. Multi-page surveys work well in combination with Skip and Conditional logic. 

#5 - Skip and Conditional Logic

Skip and conditional logic allows you to create a personalised survey experience for participants.

  Participants will spend more time sharing on topics that pertain to them, and less time on things that do not. The power to design a delightful survey experience is in your hands.

• Skip logic routes a participant from one question to another question housed on any given page of the same survey.
• Conditional logic creates a new branch of questions under it, that is, a question within a question.

#6 - Survey Pinning

Pinning a survey to your project page provides quick access and visibility into your survey. Survey pinning removes friction and elevates your survey in the structure of the page so that site visitors can’t miss it. 

#7 - Survey as a petition

Selecting the survey response counter equips surveys to be used as petitions. Click to view petitions in use, or visit CEO Matthew Crozier's blog post where he goes into greater depth. 

#8 - Randomisation

Enabling randomised options helps to remove bias by providing each participant with a different order of choices. 

#9 - Transparent Survey mode

Displaying survey responses to participants demonstrates transparency and provides insight into how the rest of the community feels about the topic after a participant completes their own survey entry.

#10 - Scheduled survey publishing and archiving

The scheduling feature is a simple, convenient, and effective way to help manage multiple ongoing projects and engagement tools. 

Presenting a timeline widget on your project that explains how and when people can get involved is an EngagementHQ best-practice. That's why we make it easy to stick to your plan by scheduling a survey's start or end date. 

Nobody can say for certain that Leonardo Da Vinci was thinking about community engagement survey design in stating “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” yet his quote isn’t far from the truth. While added controls and features may appear like extra work to you, these controls deliver a more simple, informative, and relatable survey for participants. Making an impactful change to your next survey could be just two clicks away.

Lastly, a brief update surrounding embedding EngagementHQ tools to other sites in 2020. Promoting and distributing your engagement efforts is a key component of success, and behind the scenes, we're working to deliver additional ways to present certain EngagementHQ tools to your community, including surveys. Stay tuned for more announcements coming next quarter.