Survey :: Decidim Docs

Understand the basics

The Survey component allows participants to answer questionnaires. This is useful when an organization wants to receive private feedback from participants. It allows defining a set of questions with multiple kinds of answers.

Once a survey is answered by participants, it’s not possible to modify its questions, as that would affect the integrity of the answers. If you need to modify the questions, create a new survey and unpublish the original one.

Configuration

To create a Survey component, first go in the participatory space where you want to create it.

Then:

Click on the "Components" item in the secondary menu
Click the "Add component" button
Select "Survey"
Fill the component creation form

You can still update this form and the configuration after creating the component, by clicking the Configure icon Configure icon in the components list.

Table 1. Add component: Survey form
Field	Type	Description
Name	Required	Title of this component.
Order position	Optional	The order of the component in relation with the other components. Having a lower number means a higher priority. For instance, if you have two components, "Component a" with weight "10" and "Component b" with weight "0" then "component b" is first when ordering.

Table 2. Add component: Survey form - Global settings
Field	Type	Description
Scopes enabled	Optional	Check if you want to have Scopes filtering in this component.
Scope	Optional	Which Scopes does this component belongs to.
Answers accepted from	Optional	Start date when you want to start receiving answers. Leave blank for no specific date. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm.
Answers accepted until	Optional	End date when you want to stop receiving answers. Leave blank for no specific date. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm.
Announcement	Optional	A general announcement visible on the survey page.
Delete answers when publishing the survey	Optional	Check if you want to delete answers when the survey is published. Useful for testing the survey before publishing it.

Table 3. Add component: Surveys form - Step settings
Field	Type	Description
Allow answers	Optional	Check if you want to receive answers in this survey for this phase.
Allow unregistered users to answer the survey	Optional	If active, no login is required to answer the survey. This may lead to poor or unreliable data and make you more vulnerable to automated attacks. Please use with caution. Mind that this option only allows an answer by browser session, but participants can use the Private navigation option and make multiple answers with the same device.
Announcement	Optional	A general announcement visible on the survey page for this phase.

Create a survey

Do you have repetitive surveys? For instance the same feedback form for every process? You can have a survey that gets copied and is used as a blueprint so you don’t have to manually configure the same survey each time. Learn more on Questionnaires templates.

First, select a Questionnaires templates if you want, or Skip this step.

Then you need to fill the form with the following fields:

Table 4. New survey form
Field	Type	Description
Title	Required	The title of this survey.
Description	Optional	The description of the survey.
Terms of service	Required	Legal conditions that the participants must meet to answer the survey.

Questions

Add a question

Then, click the "Add question" button to start creating your survey. You can add multiple questions per survey, and reorder or delete them.

Every question must have a statement and a type as a minimum.

Table 5. Add question form
Field	Type	Description
Statement	Required	The question itself. For instance, "What is your age category?"
Description	Optional	Additional information on the question if needed.
Mandatory	Optional	Check if participants must answer this question to complete the survey.
Character limit	Optional	The maximum characters the answer can have. Leave to 0 if no limit. Compatible with Short and Long answer question types.
Type	Required	One of the following: Short answer, Long answer, Single option, Multiple option, Sorting, Files, Matrix (Single option) or Matrix (Multiple option). See Question types for more information.

Questions types

Table 6. Question types (click to view images in detail)
Type	Frontend	Backend	Description
Short answer			Compatible with "Character limit" validation
Long answer			Compatible with "Character limit" validation
Single option			Participants have to choose a single option, with radio buttons. Add at least 2 answer options. It’s possible to define a "Free text" option, for participants to submit their own answer.
Multiple option			Participants can choose multiple options, with checkboxes. Add at least 2 answer options. It’s possible to add a validation, with the maximum number of choices. It’s possible to define a "Free text" option, for participants to submit their own answer.
Sorting			Add at least 2 answer options. Participants can drag and drop answer options to order them.
Files			Allow participants to upload files.
Matrix (Single option)			Participants have to choose between rows and columns of single options, with radio buttons.
Matrix (Multiple option)			Participants have to choose between rows and columns of multiple options, with checkboxes.

Conditional questions

Once you saved your survey, you can see that a new "Add display condition" button is added in the questions blocks. This feature allows administrators to create complex surveys with conditionality, meaning that some questions are displayed only if participants chose a specific answer in the previous questions.

Conditional questions can be difficult to configure, so be sure to test the survey behaviour before publishing it.

Table 7. Add display condition form
Field	Type	Description
Question	Required	The previous question that is the condition for displaying this question.
Condition	Required	To define the condition needed for this question to be displayed.
Answer option	Required	This field propose the answer options to the questions that need to be chose by participants to realize the condition. Only available for "Equal" and "Not Equal" conditions.
Included text	Required	Only available for "Includes text" conditions.
This condition needs to be satisfied always regardless the status of other conditions	Optional	Check if this condition is essential, even if other conditions would make the display of the question possible.

Separators

You can also add separators between questions, when you have a long survey or different topics. They allow to display the forms questions in different steps.

Separators can only be ordered or deleted.

Title and description

You can also add a title and description section, to bring clarity to the form and separate it in different sections. Coupled with separators, they allow to give titles and descriptions to the survey steps. They can also be used alone, in a one page survey.

Export answers

It’s possible to export the survey participant answers to different formats: CSV, JSON, XLSX (Excel) or PDF.

The platform doesn’t handle the answers processing nor presenting results or summary to the users, that need to be done externally.

Examples

Some examples of where this component is used: