(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

For a long time, our survey charts have used an engine that delivers each graph or chart as an image. The reports have always looked great, but there was something missing. We wanted them to be a little more polished…and we wanted them to be interactive.

So this week, we announced the launch of our new survey charts. On the surface, you’ll notice that they look quite a bit slicker than the former version. They also bring an element of interactivity to them that our charts haven’t had before. When you hover over a column in a bar graph or a wedge in a pie chart, you’ll now see metrics from your survey results overlaid on top of the chart.

You can also interact with the new survey charts by clicking on a section of the chart, which will highlight it and offer more survey data. And in the Run Report screen, hovering over the data in the Response Breakdown table will highlight the relevant piece of the chart, giving readers a good visual indicator of how the survey data fits together.

And they print beautifully.

We’ve been testing this format of reports in a few different places for a little while, and we like it a lot – with this week’s roll-out, you should see their use more widespread across the entire site. Hope you enjoy them – let us know what you think!

Well, we have a fantastic answer for you! If you have an Enterprise or above level account, you now have the ability to run a Page Fall Off Report. This report (shown below) can show you on what page people stop taking your survey in a visual manner.

We hope that by providing this report, it will help you with your survey design as well as increase your completion rates. After all, the most important part about creating a survey is to be able to analyze the completed data one you’re done.

Happy Surveying!