(Stick with me, it does make sense.)

This customer is an event company who runs surveys for each one of their events. Their events are all run by different groups and each group does not have access to the other groups’ data – but the customer still needs to run reports on all of the data combined.

While this is an event company running surveys, it occurred to us that many other organizations likely have similar needs for both master survey reporting and individual event survey reporting.

The nice thing about SurveyGizmo is that as survey software (which always seems to be used for a general purpose tool), we are very adaptable. We talked with our customer for a little while about their needs and came up with the idea of a “mother ship” survey.

If you have seen the movie Independence Day, you’ll remember that a single mother ship came to earth and launched a series of “smaller” (they were still city-sized) ships that began to take over the earth. The trick to defeating these ships was using a “signal” that tied them back to the original mothership.

Now don’t get me started on how ridiculous the entire movie was…but the idea of a huge mother ship that was tethered through a communication lines to smaller ships gave me an idea. (This is the way my mind works – seriously.)

What we did for this customer was to create a generalized master survey (the Mothership) that could be copied for any event. A really simple custom script (shown below) that’s part of that mothership survey ties all of those copies back to the original. So any data they collect is also collected in the master survey – automatically, in real time. Pretty cool, huh?

The nice thing about this solution is it’s simple and versatile. The individual event surveys can be changed as needed – rebranded, new questions added, irrelevant questions disabled – but they still transmit any relevant data back to the master survey for grouped reporting.

We even got fancy and added hidden fields that identify which survey is which in the master survey reporting.

Finally, thanks to the enterprise settings in our software, each event team only has access to the individual event surveys that they should have access to. So security and privacy are maintained across the organization.

If anyone else out there has similar problems that need to be solved, keep in mind this solution.

Here’s a sample of the basic custom script if you’re curious:

//---start code

//Just build a really simple array of question ids/values to transfer to the master survey.
// A loop would be easier, but this is long hand for effect.

%%datatotransfer = array();
%%datatotransfer["4"] = sgapiGetValue(4);
%%datatotransfer["2"] = sgapiGetValue(2);

//Then using sgapiListAdd (which creates a response in another survey and pass in the data!  Easy!!)
// 555555 would be the ID to the master survey.

sgapiListAdd(555555,%%datatotransfer);

//--end code

This series reduces the barrier to entry for using Custom Scripting to perform some very powerful tasks that go beyond the already advanced feature set in SurveyGizmo. While it still requires some basic knowledge of concepts such as Question IDs, the scripts are designed to assist users in enabling these features in their account. Custom Scripting is the stop-gap between current features and future features built into SurveyGizmo’s application in the user-friendly way customers have come to expect from the survey tool.

So far there are 3 tutorials available, with the following (unlinked) tutorials coming in the future:

• Automatic Survey Login Action
• Age Verification by Birth Date
• Verifying Text Fields Match
• Hide Question if there is only 1 Piped in Option
• Show a Limited Number of Randomized Pages
• Quota Management for Individual Question Options
• Negative Piping (hiding rows in a later table or options in a later question that were NOT selected in a previous checkbox question)

Of course, we will continue to work on tutorials for a broader audience while the development team adds new features to SurveyGizmo However, for the advanced user, this series should provide some useful insight and tools for your survey arsenal.