Survey

The Survey component allows people to answer questionnaires. This is useful when an organization wants to receive private feedback, although it’s possible to publish the answers manually as well. It allows defining a set of questions with multiple kinds of answers.

From this starting point, there could be other configurations, such as:

if the answering is limited to a time period
what answer types should have the questions, like short (one line), long (multiple lines), single or multiple options, sorting through a list, etc.
if there’s an answer validation like how many characters as maximum should have an answer
if there’s a maximum number of options to select in multiple options questions

Some examples of where this component was used:

Example of a survey

To configure the Survey component:

Sign in as admin
Go to admin panel
In the main sidebar, click in the button for the space that you want to configure the component for. For instance, it could be "Processes", "Assemblies" or "Conferences".
Go to components
Click on "Add component" button
Click on "Survey"
Fill the Add component form

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

Add component

Add component form

Table 1. Add component: Survey form
Field	Type	Description
Name	Required	What is the title of this component. For instance, "Surveys"
Order position	Optional	Which order will it have in relation to the other surveys. Having a lower number means a higher priority. For instance, if you have two surveys, "Survey a" with weight "10" and "Survey b" with weight "0", then "Survey b" will be 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 Scope does this component belongs to.
Answers accepted from	Optional	Start date when you want to receive answers. Leave blank for no specific date. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:ii
Answers accepted until	End date when you want to stop receiving answers. Leave blank for no specific date. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:ii	Announcement
Optional	A general announcement that’ll be visible on the general surveys landing page.	Delete answers when publishing the survey

In the cases where the space that this component will be used has Phases, for instance, in Participatory Processes, then you can also define different behaviors per Step.

Table 3. Add component: Surveys form - Step settings
Field	Type	Description
Allow answers	Optional	Check if you want to receive answers in this survey.
Allow unregistered users to answer the survey	Optional	If active, no login will be required in order to answer the survey. This may lead to poor or unreliable data and it will be more vulnerable to automated attacks. 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 that’ll be visible on the general survey landing page.

Permissions

An administrator can choose which kind of Authorizations a participant need to have to make certain actions in the surveys:

Answer

New survey form

When you create a new survey you’ll need to fill the form with the following fields:

Edit survey form

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 for so you don’t have to manually configure the same survey everytime. Learn more about Templates.

Table 4. New survey form
Field	Type	Description
Title	Required	What is the title of this survey. For instance, "Feedback"
Description	Optional	What is the description of this survey.
Terms of service	Required	Legal conditions that the participants must agree to in order to answer the survey.

In the bottom of this form there’s a button that allows you to "Add question".

add question button

You can add multiple questions per survey, and reorder or delete them. It’s possible to also add separators between questions.

Every question has to have a statement and a type as a minimum.

question form

Table 5. Add question form
Field	Type	Description
Statement	Required	The question itself. For instance, "What is your age category?"
Description	Optional	Explanation of the question being made.
Mandatory	Optional	Check if this question is required to respond to submit the answer.
Character limit	Optional	How many characters has as a maxim the answer to this question. 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.

Depending in the question type, it’s possible to add validations to the answers, like if the question is mandatory (participants would need to provide an answer in order to submit the form) or if the answer is limited to a certain number of characters as maximum in short and long answers.

question form limits backend

question form limits frontend

Question types

A survey can have multiple questions with different types, such as:

Short answer
Long answer
Single option
Multiple option
Sorting
Files
Matrix (Single option)
Matrix (Multiple option)

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

Templates

For the cases where administrators need to define multiple surveys that are mostly the same but used in different contexts, it’s possible to define a template. When there’s one defined for a survey, then it’ll ask to select the Template and create the survey based on this one or in the other hand if there’s no need to use a template, then it’s possible to Skip the template selection.

Choose template form

Export answers

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

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