The Basics: Creating your First Survey (webinar)

Good morning, everyone. My name is Mario Lurig with SurveyGizmo and you are attending our webinar, The Basics: Building Your First Online Survey. Once again, my name is Mario Lurig and we’re going to be covering a few different details about building surveys, actually going through the process of building your first survey.

On the bottom right here, you’ll notice we have the option to tweet about this webinar, if you do, please include @SurveyGizmo, so we can follow those tweets. There’s one more bit of business we’ll cover before we talk about what we’ll be covering today. If you do have any questions, there will be a Question and Answer session, as part of this webinar. On your Go To Webinar control panel, there’s a section for chat and questions. If you have any questions at any point in time during the webinar, please enter them in that box and send them through. I will answer those questions at the end of the webinar. You can send them through at any point in time. So when it strikes you, please send them through and we’ll cover them at the end.

There’s also going to be a recording of this video, you’ll all receive an email in 24 hours. They’ll notify you of the video being posted and where to view that video, that includes also the slides we used, as part of this. The majority of the webinar is by presentation, not by PowerPoint, or in this case, Google Presentation.

Now, let’s talk about what we’re going to cover today in the webinar. So here are the goals, we’re going to cover adding questions through the various, different methods. We’re also going to talk about answers within those survey questions. We’re going to talk about our first introduction to basic Logic, that’s adding show/hide triggers for in Page Logic. We’ll cover creating another text field for radio button and checkbox questions, adding Basic Jump or Skip Logic, so this is our second introduction to Basic Logic, it goes with our paid plans. We’ll talk about adding an email auto responder notification, sometimes referred to as just send an email, so you’d like to send an email when the online survey is completed by someone. That’s what an email auto responder is. And then we’ll talk about publishing the online survey and the different methods available for publishing your survey.

We’ll then have our break for the Question and Answer session and then at the very end, we’ll wrap up with one last detail, so do stick around through the Question and Answer session for the last portion. All right, with all that being said, we’re going to go ahead and get started.

Adding Survey Questions to Your Survey

Now, the very first topic is adding questions, so let’s talk about actually creating the first online survey. When you log into your account, if you don’t have any surveys created yet, you’ll be presented with the Getting Started tab, which gives you a kind of an introduction to the different features and availability of items within SurveyGizmo. If you do have projects available, you’ll see the My Projects tab, which will list any online surveys, polls, quizzes or forms that you’ve created in your account.

Now, if you’ve been with us for quite awhile, you might also have a SurveyGizmo 2 account, which includes online surveys from SurveyGizmo 2. Now, we’re not going to covering the old version of SurveyGizmo, but that’s what this blue tab is here. Most people attending this webinar, most people using SurveyGizmo, will not ever see this tab.

Now, I’m going to call attention to one other item here before we start building the survey. On the top left, we have something called Project History. Project History is a great way to access online surveys you’ve recently accessed under your account on this computer. This gives you quick access to jump in, so you can see that there’s a webinar on reporting, recently on the Projects Overview page. By clicking this link, I would be brought directly to it.

Now, we’re going to go ahead and get started by creating a brand new online survey. So I’m going to click Create a Survey. Now, we want to go ahead and give that survey a title. Now this is all pretty straightforward. Initially, your survey title is going to be what’s visible to not only your respondents, those who are taking the survey, but your title will also be how you identify your survey within SurveyGizmo when it’s listed on the dashboard.

Now you can change all of these details later, so don’t worry, nothing’s set in stone. So now it asks whether you want, how you want to build your online survey. Now, we’re going to end up using a blank survey template, but let’s talk about the other items we have available here. You can copy an existing online survey, this is another survey that’s already created within your account. So you can choose that and it will make a copy of that particular survey.

You can also use one of our prebuilt survey templates. If you’re new to SurveyGizmo or surveying, in general, these are a great place to start. Just because you start with a copy of an existing survey or a prebuilt template, doesn’t mean you’re locked in. You can actually start off with says this customer satisfaction tech support and then make any adjustments as needed, they’re just to help.

Our final one is Word Import. Now, this has a tutorial wrapped around it, has the ability to create an online survey, a simple survey within a text file or doc file and then copy and paste that in here and it will use the special language to create your survey for you. So we’re going to switch it back to a blank survey template and now we have Choose a Base Theme. Now we have a large collection of survey themes available to you, you can see previews of all of them listed here. We even have some that are specific to different events or times and we have some that are specific to particular audiences. So we have an iPhone/Android/iPad friendly survey theme, if you’re going to sending it strictly to iPhones or smartphones or iPads. Maybe it’s going to be exclusively on iPads, we have a survey theme for that, as well.

If you’re curious on what your online survey might look like, you can always hit Preview, which will open a new window or a new tab and display for you what that survey template, excuse me, that survey theme looks like with some sample questions. So here are a few sample survey questions and you can see how that’s going to look. You can even do a quick switch here and take a second gander at some of the other survey themes.

Now we’re going to keep it pretty simple and we’re going to stick to our standard theme here at the beginning, which is corporate shapes. If you do have any custom survey themes in your account, they’re going to be listed at the very early beginning.

So, with that selected, we’re going to go ahead and choose to Create the Survey. And when you’re creating a brand new survey, you’re brought directly into this Online Survey Editor. Now, the main Edit Survey tab is the main question out there and there are other sub-tabs available to you.

Really quickly, let’s talk about what’s here.

The Overview tab provides you with an overview of the online survey responses that you’ve collected so far. The Edit Survey tab is designed to edit the contents of your online survey, whether it be the survey questions, pages, so on and so forth, or things like look and feel survey settings, which are general settings for the survey or text translation settings.

Publishing is what we’ll be covering at the end of this webinar and this is how you share your online survey with the world. And Reporting is how you analyze your survey results or export your results. So, let’s head back to Edit Survey here and talk about it.

Now, a new survey is created with two pages to start. The first one is, of course, page one and it’s empty and you need to add some survey questions. The second page is the thank you page. This is a special page. And thank you page is designed for, to terminate the respondent. So they reach the thank you page, that causes the respondent to be marked as a completed response, so they have completed all the way through. It presents them with simply a thank you message that you’ve created. We’re going to add something else to this later, but it’s a special page, you can’t add survey questions to a thank you page because it’s the end of the survey, kind of the end of the line, right? You can’t ask one more question.

Now, I recommend that even though you have page one here listed, you go ahead and edit that. You can simply click in and it’ll change to an Editor, and you can rename this, so we can call this “general questions”. You can either hit enter or click Save and it will save your changes. This will become very useful if you’re using any branching, piping, or other survey logic, or if you’re trying to decipher what pages contain what items later on. So it’s important to label your survey pages.

Now, there’s multiple ways to add questions to the survey, so let’s talk about the newest one that’s a really fast and easy method. There’s a tool bar that you can drag and drop anywhere within the tool. You can even click these four squares and it will toggle it to be a different layout if you like to place it as such. Now, I’m a fan of its default placement here on the left, so I’m going to leave it there. But this toolbar represents multiple survey question types and elements that you can add to your survey. As you hover over each item, it’ll describe what that item represents. For instance, here we have a drag to add a drag and dropdown menu question. And it moves through the steps.

We have one here to select, so you just want to drop it in place, actions and a few other items. Now, the first thing we’re actually going to be adding in here, move this over. We’re going to ask a simple question called “what is your age?” Now, that’s going to be a field for them to actually enter in their age manually. So I’m going to select it from the left and drop it into place. Now the best part is that when you drop it in, you can drop it in anywhere, so if you have five questions on the page, you can drop it in between questions one and two, if you like. So, SurveyGizmo’s survey software makes it really quick and easy to make those changes.

So, I’ve chosen to drag in an open answer text field and it says, “Well, which type would you like?” Now, these have special features through some of them. For instance, in a case of our example, we want to ask them what is your age, so we’re going to choose number. This forces them to respond by entering in a number into the field. They can’t enter 42 and type it out in words, they have to actually enter a numerical value. That’s the difference between a number field and just a plain textbox survey field. That same sort of forced response or validation is also enforced by email percent and date in their respective manners. So I’m going to choose what is your age.

Now, we’re faced with one additional choice here with our first question, which is, “Is this a required question?” What is a required question? In SurveyGizmo, if you require a question, that survey question will only be visible, excuse me, that question, scratch that, that survey question will only, when it’s presented on the survey, will have a red asterisk placed next to it. That’s to denote that it is required. That they must answer the question to continue through the survey. So, if I was to require this question, they must answer it, otherwise they will be returned back to this page immediately and not be allowed to continue to the next page of the survey. So that’s how we determined a required survey question.

I’m going to go ahead and click add question on the bottom right and it’ll add that right into the Editor. Now, one of the most recent improvements with SurveyGizmo is we’ve added some additional features to the Editor to help display and make changes quickly and easily. On the right side here, you’ll see we have an ID, which is for some advanced uses. We have a required box and we even have a checkbox to skip question numbering, in other words, let’s avoid numbering for this particular question and it removes say the one. I can uncheck or check this as I’d like and it will dynamically make that change. Now, it’s no longer required and there’s no longer a red asterisk. You can check it again and it will become required. So, it’s a quick way to go through your entire survey and make adjustments to things like required and skip question numbering.

Great, so we’ve added in our first question. Now it’s time to add in our next survey question. For this one, we want to take, we’re not sure, we’re going to ask them about their gender, but maybe I don’t want to use the toolbar this time. Maybe I just want to take a look at what are the questions we have to offer. So, we have buttons here on the bottom right that allow you to add in different elements. You click add question, it will present to you a full list of all the survey question types available at your account level. If you select any of these question types, in the bottom left, it’ll show you an image, as an example for what that question type might look like. So, here we have a checkbox, a radio button question, a list of dropdown menus and even some of them more complex survey question types.

Now, we’re going to ask the question, “what is your gender?” For that, we’re going ask that to be a single select radio button question. So, they’re going answer what is your gender, male or female? We’re also going to make this a required question. Now here’s where we get to put in the answers. Now, I could simply type in male, female or I can make use of our premade lists. The dropdown box below allows you to select from some premade lists that we’ve provided to make things easy for you. So, they include things like numeric values, some demographic information, here’s gender, for instance, locales, such as states or countries and even some rating scales are available for you. In our case, we’re going to choose gender and when we select it, it automatically populates the answers field with some appropriate answers for that list.

If I was to switch this out to age, you would see it would replace everything to the age set. I’m going to go ahead and switch it back to gender and we’re going to go ahead and click Add Question. Now, it’s added it right into the page, so we can see here, what is your gender? We’re going to add one more, and in this case, it’s also a radio button and I’m going to use drag and drop. Now, I’m going to drag this in and I’m going to drop it right here in the dead center. Now the question is, “are you currently pregnant?” So, let me go ahead and bring in. Now, you’ll notice the interface is slightly different when we dragged and dropped in this particular question from the toolbar. It’s brought us right into the Editor. The functionality is the same, asking the question, choosing whether it’s required or not and then adding in your answers. So, here the case is, yes or no and I’m just going to go ahead and use our premade list to keep things simple.

Now, if I hit Save here, it’ll automatically change this around to display it in the typical way you would see answers when you’re editing a survey question after its first creation. We’ll be going over this again in just a sec. So, it’s added that in and I’m going to go ahead and hit Save. All right, so we have a few questions in order, however, I think that I put this in the wrong place. Question number two here, are you currently pregnant, needs to actually be below the gender question. Don’t worry, you don’t need to delete the question. We have a bunch of options on the left, you can edit it, copy it, remove it or delete it or you can actually reorder it. There are a few different links available to you for doing so.

You can click the Reorder icon, you can click Reorder and link at the top of any page or we even have it under Edit Survey, they all go to the same place. So, when I click Reorder, we have the ability to move items around in the survey by dragging and dropping, just like adding questions. So, I can move this to a new position and now that’s going to our new order when we hit Save. If we had multiple pages, we could even drag the entire page itself around to make adjustments. This is where naming your survey pages becomes very handy. So, don’t worry just because it’s in the wrong place right now, when you’re building your survey, you can make adjustments before you launch your online survey to the position of your questions.

One quick note, you cannot drag items onto or off of the thank you page. Remember, the thank you page is special, it’s the end page, the termination page. So I’m going to go ahead and save our changes. What we’ve gone over with adding survey questions. Now, the drag and drop toolbar on the left side is a straight, speedy way to add questions quickly to your survey.

Now, if you’re looking at the full list of our survey question types, if you select any of them, you can preview that type on the bottom left. And, finally, just because you created them doesn’t mean they’re stuck in stone, you can move questions and pages around anywhere within your survey, with the exception of the thank you page.

Survey Question Answers

Now, I’m going to very quickly add some other, one other quick question here and we’re going to add one more question to the survey and we’re going to work with it because we’re going to learn a bit about answers in a little more detail. So, I’m going to add this question in and we’re going to say this is going to be, I’m going to choose Add Questions and I’m going to choose a new question type, I’m going to choose a likert scale, I’m going to say, how much do you like ice cream? And I’ve got a list here that says, I like it a lot, I like it, I’m neutral, I don’t really like it, I don’t like it at all. Now, we could leave this as is or we could make adjustments to the answers. For now, I’m actually going to click Add and Edit this Question because I wan to go right into the Editor and discuss one other detail.

Now, when we see the answers here, we’re presented with a few different items. First, you see another arrow icon here for Reordering Item, so you can move items around. Now, this is kind of a rating scale, right? We’re not changing much, we want to keep these in order, but in some cases, there’s a need to reorder your answers before you launch your survey. So, once again, it’s not set in stone, you can do so.

But notice here, we have a title that we can edit and we have something called reporting values. Now, don’t forget, we always have our tool tips available, you can click, that’ll give you more information on what a reporting value is. However, the basic way to understand them is that the title is what the survey respondent will see when they’re taking the online survey. The reporting value is what will be saved to the system in SurveyGizmo and will be available in say your export, so your export to CSV or an Excel file or when you’re looking at your data. Typically, the reporting value is what you’re going to be recording. This is very helpful when you’re dealing with something like answers where there might be a rating scale here.

You can change this in one of two ways. So, let’s talk about changing it. If this answer is incorrect, so, “I like it a lot.” You want to change that to “I like it lots and lots.” Now, before I made this change, these two were exactly the same. The title and the reporting value. So, if I hit Save, and then I re-edit that same question, you’ll notice that now the title under reporting value still match, as we’ve changed it here, because they were the same before, SurveyGizmo’s smart enough to know that you’re just building your online survey, it’s still in design, haven’t collected any data, so you probably wanted to change both items.

However, if you wanted to change just one item, for instance, just change the reporting value, you can edit that, there’s a little Edit icon and you can choose Edit Properties. The reporting value is listed here and you can say, I like the change, I like it lots and lots, reporting value to be five. So, it will save to the system as the numeric value 5. Why? Because you actually want to make this scale calculate, so you can have an average, they like it at 4.5 is their scale. So, as you can see here in the example, you have the displayed item is still, “I like it lots and lots,” but what’s actually going to be saved is the reporting value of 5.

Now, there are a few other ways to do it. You can use Add/Edit Answers in Bulk. This brings you up to an editor that looks like when you first created it. You’ll notice that there’s a little pipe symbol included. This is a special language and we have an example at the top that let’s you determined the difference between the title and the reporting value. So, for each of these, I can make adjustments very quickly and easily and change the reporting values around, and we’ve made the positive the higher value here. I’m going to save those answers and it returns us back to the main answers window with the new reporting values. And I’ll go ahead and save that work.

Now, one quick note, if you’ve already launched your survey and are collecting data, even if they’re the exact same, your title and your reporting value, if you change your title maybe to fix a typo, your reporting value will go unchanged. The reason is that you’ve already collected data with that reporting value and to ensure consistency in your data, we will do everything in our power to warn you or try not to change that reporting value. Even if it has a typo, it’s better to have all your data together, rather than split data, incorrect data. So, just be aware, there’s a slight difference in the behavior after you launch your survey. So, it’s always good to make sure you test.

Answer, titles and reporting values. We have the titles, what the survey taker sees, the reporting values, what’s saved and a satisfaction scale’s a great use of different titles and reporting values.

Introducing Basic Page Logic

We’re going to answer one question. Remember, we had two questions that says, What is your gender?” and “Are you currently pregnant?” So, I wondered. Would you want to ask males if they’re currently pregnant? The answer is probably “no,” right? Because every male is going answer “No, I’m not pregnant.”

But that doesn’t give you a good indication of the number of individuals that are actually pregnant because it’s only relevant to those who are female. Well, how do we go about that? How do we ensure that males won’t see the pregnancy question? We’re going to be making use of Show/Hide triggers. Show/Hide triggers are designed for any page Logic. They’re meant to trigger, that based off of the choice in a previous question, in this case a gender question, a follow-up question will be seen. In that case, “Are you currently pregnant?” We’re going to see this in practice, I’m going to build it very quickly, see it in practice and then we’ll come back and review what I did.

So, we’re going to go ahead and build that and we’re going to say, “All right, here’s the gender question.” I’m going to edit this, it’s a question higher up on the page and we’re going to say, “All right, if they’re female, I want to Show/Hide, are you currently pregnant?” Save my work, save it again. We’ll see that now it says there’s question Logic a Show/Hide trigger here, let’s see this. So, on the top right, we have a Preview Survey button. This will open up a new window and give you a preview of what a survey taker will see when they’re taking your online survey. It’s not actually collecting data, it’s just meant as a demonstration and also allow you to test your survey.

So, here we have question number two, “What is your gender?” Now, I’m going to actually make one more change here, as a follow-up question, I’m going to go ahead and say, “Skip question numbering for question number 3” by checking that box off to the right side. So, it’s going to work and save that change really quickly to the system and then we’re going to hit Preview again. Excellent.

So, here we have “What is your age?” “What is your gender?” Now, if they choose that they’re male, nothing happens, nothing has changed. However, the moment they choose female, the follow-up question appears. “Are you currently pregnant?” And, remember, this question is a required question. Well, if you remember, I said that if it’s a required survey question, they must answer it to continue. So, if I was to hit Submit right now, it would say, “I’m sorry, there’s some questions that are required that you must answer.” All right, well I’m going to answer the age question.

However, if I’m male, I don’t see that other follow-up question. Therefore, the requirement is a moot point, we skip over the requirement if they don’t see the question. So don’t worry. If you want to require a question, but it’s only for a certain set of people, this is where Show/Hide Logic is really handy. So, once again, when they choose female, the follow-up question appears for them to answer it.

So, let’s talk about what I did. Now, the rules are that the question has to be on the same page and the question that’s doing the triggering, is higher up on the page. So, if I edit this, I’m choosing which answer will trigger the Show/Hide effect, so there’s that little Show/Hide, there’s a green check right now, because I’ve already set it up. If I click on it, brought right in the Show/Hide section and it will show you any of the items that are eligible. These can be questions, descriptive text, a variety of different elements are available to you, as long as they’re on the same page and lower down.

So, we simply selected the “Are you currently pregnant?” and checked that, hit Save and that placed the checkmark here, when we saved it again, we had added the Show/Hide trigger. That’s it, you only need to set it up on the triggering answer.

So, here’s a quick follow-up on Show/Hide triggers. In page Logic, any number of follow-up questions and they must be below. Now, if you forget anything about Show/Hide triggers, don’t worry. You want to make use of our tutorial system. So, in the bottom right, we offer some feature tutorials. The Show/Hide Logic is actually Tutorial number 6, you click on that, and I’m actually opening this in a new window here, it’ll bring you right to the SurveyGizmo tutorial and it’ll show you the steps, highlighting each of the different items.

If you’d like, you can also look at any of our other tutorials by simply clicking Browse All Tutorials. Finally, if you know what you’re looking for, I can go ahead and do Show/Hide and search in the box on the top right and it will go ahead and look through all of the different tutorials that we have here and present them for you. I can choose Dynamic, and it will try and find one that’s an appropriate fit for you. You can go through and click through. For instance, if I was looking for information about the survey title, I’d click in and it’ll bring up the results right here in this window. So, there is an in-app search and we’re adding more and more tutorials every single day.

Radio and Checkbox Survey Question Types

So, the next up we’re going to talk about is creating another text field, so for this, we’re actually going to create a few more quick questions. So, we’re going to ask two more questions and I’m going to create these very quickly here for us. I’m going to ask, “What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” It’s going to be a radio button question and we’re going to have a few different options. So, place in those answers, I’m going to go Add Another Question, keep it quick and simple.

Now, we’re going to add in a different survey question type, we’re going to add in a checkbox and we’re going to ask them to select any colors that they like. And here we’re going to have a few other options, there’s going to be a few other answers and add that in. Great. So as you can see presented here, we have our two different questions. Now, in both cases, both of these questions have an other listed. Now, five isn’t fully ready yet, and we’ll get there in a moment, but I want to talk about the difference.

The first question here, “What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” We’re asking them for their favorite flavor. We’ve put an other field here for them to choose, but we haven’t included a box for them to enter in their own answer. Why? Because in this question, we’re only interested in the fact that they don’t like one of the flavors we’ve provided. We’re more interested in knowing, “Is it one of these?” If not, it’s something else. I don’t want you to tell me what something else is. If you like strawberry cheesecake, that’s great, but that’s not relevant to the question. Remember, you always want to make your questions depending on the answers you want to get out. So, we have just a basic “other.”

However, in the case of this colors question, I actually want them to specify an item. But there’s no box here for them to specify what other item they would like. So, in this case, what other color. So, I’m going to go ahead and hit Edit on this question. As I’m brought in, as I’m brought in, we can go down to the other “please specify.” Now, there’s a couple of ways you can go through it, there’s the plus sign for special or you can always go the simple method of just hitting Edit and doing Edit Properties. Both will lead you into the same place.

The special settings is what we’re looking for. Now, there’s a few of them here. But the one we’re interested in this case is called “other.” The other ones and you’re welcome to play with them and try them out yourself to see what they do, but if we choose “other,” and hit Save, you’ll notice the place is a check, I hit Save again, and you can see now that there’s an editing box available to you. So, if I was to reload our preview here, when they go ahead and select “I like pink, magenta and other,” it automatically puts the cursor and highlights this box.

Now, I’ve gone a step further and said, “Please specify.” Because I’ve encouraged the respondent to fill in an answer here. So, I like brown, for instance and they can enter in that answer.

Now, the respondent is not required to. If they choose “other, please specify,” they don’t have to answer anything in this box. If that’s important to you, you can use a little bit of direction to ensure that they fill that out. You’re creating another text field, it does not require input into the text field and it can be added to radio button and checkbox questions. Just remember, you have to go that extra set with special settings if you want to have a box for them to actually edit.

Adding Basic Jump or Skip Survey Logic

So, our first, next introduction is going to be related to Logic. So we covered the in-page survey Logic using the Show/Hide triggers, right, that we had up top, with male and female. Now, we’re going to talk about doing Logic for doing things like a Page Jump. Now, we have a variety of survey Logic, but we’re going to actually create a new page. Here you can see there’s an Insert Page button. The Insert Page button creates a brand new page. Once again, we don’t have an answer here, so, we’re going to say, “Insert New Page” and we’re going to say “females only.” So, we’re going to have a page that typically would have questions on it, but for time’s sake, I’m just going to add a quick bit of text in here that says, “This page is only for females.” So I’m going to add in text, “This page is only shown to females.” Excellent, add that in.

Now, I’ve added descriptive text. Descriptive text is not a question but it can do things like instructions or insert the code for a You Tube embedded video or audio, whatever you’d like to do, that’s what that’s designed for. So, we have a page for females only. We’re going to insert one more page here and we’re going to make this new page for everyone. So, the idea is that we have a page of questions that are unique to females, while we have a final page which is for everyone to ask some additional questions and we’re going to go ahead and just add in some text and say that everybody is everyone together and add that in.

Now, so our goal here is that males don’t see page 2. Remember, when naturally people are going through an online survey, they progress step by step like you’re going through pages of a book, page 1, page 2, page 3 and then page 4 at the end. However, you could alter that natural flow by adding a Skip or a Jump. In our case, it’s all built with our Survey Logic Builder and that’s done whenever they click Next. So, here’s our Preview window, when they click Next, I’m actually going to reload this because I’ve now made some changes so I need to look at the new preview. We have a Next button. When they hit Next, that’s when Logic is evaluated. So, on page 1, we’re going to ahead and add Logic, using the button on the bottom left. There also is a button for Logic on our toolbar.

So, here we can describe that Logic and this says, “Skip males over page 2.” This just reminds us what we’re doing. Now, on the Survey Logic Builder that has its own tutorial, you can check out, it goes into great detail about the Logic conditions and the Logic Builder. You choose the question that you’d like to trigger. So, here, we have a few different things we can choose, including things like email invitation data, geotracking data, that’s based off of IP address, their geographical location. I’m going to choose the “What is your gender?” question.

Two things happen when I choose that. One, the system will try and choose the best conditional operator here in the center. It’s choosing “Is In List,” there’s a full list of them, it’s all described in the Logic Tutorial or in our Logic Webinar, which we have a recording of. It will also present you, if there are answers present for the person, excuse me, for the question. It’ll go ahead and present those to you. So, here we say, “What is your gender, male.” So, we’re saying, if their gender they selected is male, then we’re going to do something. And we’re going to go down to the Logic Action section and say, “I’d like to jump them to a page.” Here, once again, we’re using the names of the pages that we’ve created, so this is where naming those pages becomes very helpful. We’re going to jump them to the Everyone Page.

Now, we’re going to go ahead and save this and this Logic Rule is now going to be added on to the bottom of page 1. You can see it’s been highlighted here. I’m going to scroll up a little so you can have an orientation. You can see here, here’s our title, it says, “If they answer question number two Is In List male, then jump to page number three. So, let’s go ahead and see this in action. First, we’re going to take it as a female. So, we’re going to say, a 23-year-old female that is not currently pregnant. I’m going to skip these other questions because they’re not required, so I can do so and I’m going hit Next. I should then be presented to “This page is only shown to females.” And you can see I’m still in this showing the titles of each page that says, “females only.” When I hit Next, I can actually flow to page 3 and “everyone together.”

I’m going to go ahead and head back and make an adjustment here. And I’m going to make an adjustment that says, “Gender is male,” I’m going to hit Next. You’ll notice that I didn’t see the “females only” page, I went straight to “everyone together.” Because as I hit Next, it triggered the Logic that was attached to this page. Now, you can add multiple Logic Rules to a single online survey page. I can add in additional Logic and I can say, “All right, I’d like to do something if they are, said their age is less than 18, then I’d like to disqualify them with a special message.” If I add this in, it’s tacked on to the very bottom and you can see multiple rules listed here.

You could even build complex Logic by adding additional conditions. This is varied by plan level, but the Logic Builder is part of our paid plans and you can add in things like their age is less than 18 and they said that they are female, then disqualify them, for instance. So, you can build complex Logic Rules, if you’d like. And just like survey questions, you can remove them using the item, excuse me, the icons on the left.

All right, so let’s do a quick review of the Logic Builder and Skip Logic. Always set your Rules first, then decide on what the action will be, such as skipping them, disqualifying them and then redirecting them. You can have multiple Page Logic Rules on a single page and then the best conditional statement, that’s the part in the middle, as In List, Equal To, Is Less Than, is automatically chosen, is automatically selected when you choose your question. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one that’s relevant for you, check out the Logic Builder Tutorial, as well as video for more information.

Sending an Email When Your Online Survey is Complete

So, let’s talk about adding an email auto responder. So, maybe this particular survey is something, maybe like a contact form you have on your website and, which if you have that, maybe you’re not having someone fill it out all the time. So what you’re most interested in is to be notified whenever someone fills it out.

Okay, so you want to add something to your thank you page to notify you. And the simplest way to be notified is to add an email auto responder, a send email action. Now, the difference between an action and a survey question: a question asks the respondent for something, an action does something. So, if I click Add Action, just like with questions, we’re presented with a list of all the action types that are available to us on this particular page and you can see here that under Advanced, we have one called Send Email, so notify all on completion of the online survey. We’re going to give it a title and click Add and Edit action. Well, this will reload the window here and provide us with the Send Email action.

Now, you can change where you’re going to send the email to, where you’re going to send it from, all of these are available and changes available to you. If you’d like to send it to yourself, it’s pretty straightforward, just put in your name and email address. If you’ve collected the email address from the respondent themselves, and you want to send them maybe a quick thank you follow-up, instead of sending yourself a notification, you can use these quick helpers and say, “I’d like to send it to the survey taker,” you can choose which survey question collects their email address, I don’t have any questions in this particular online survey to collect their email address, but I can go ahead and choose that and click Use These Fields and it puts a special code called a Merge code into this email address field that is automatically replaced by the email address that they entered into that survey question. Everything else is straightforward, you have your subject, your text version and your HTML version, if you choose of your email.

I want to call your attention to something on the left here. Now, we were mentioning we want to be notified at the end of the, when they finish the survey by email. So, it might be handy for you not only to be notified that someone completed the survey, but it might also be handy to get some of the answers they gave within the survey. That’s using the Merge Helper on the left side. When you click on this, it provides you with a list of all the questions you have, all the options within your survey, much like we did on the last helper.

And you choose, say the gender question, say, ““What is your gender?” Insert a cursor and it’ll add the special code called Merge Codes. That will represent and be changed dynamically to the answer that they provided. Even better, the Merge Helper allows you to merge in all questions that exist currently. Now, I don’t recommend doing this until you’ve fully finalized your online survey, because it’s not, when you click Merge All Questions, it goes by whatever’s currently in the survey. So, if I click Merge All Questions, insert a cursor, it creates a breakdown of all the pages, the questions themselves and then the special code for the answer for that question. So, here you’re seeing the full list of questions. So, this is a contact form, you’ve now provided yourself by email and notification that they’ve completed the survey and this is the person’s contact details. You can get in touch with them immediately.

At the bottom, we have a few other details, some advance options available for you and we have our Logic Builder again. You’ll see this again and again through different places of the tool where you can set up different survey Logic. So, here, you’re saying send this message when the following is true. So, maybe you only want to be notified when pregnant females complete this survey to stick to our example survey. So, they say, “What is your gender? Is female.” Then it will send this email along. Otherwise, the email’s not sent.

When I save this, you’ll notice that we have a new action added and it’s saying it’s not complete because they did not include a “To” address. And you can see that there’s also Logic applied to it. So, this extra color coding is available to you.

So, notice that when you’re editing an action, in most cases, there’s single page with all of your, all of the items listed here in a full list. When you’re editing a question, I’m going to scroll back up to a question here, you’ll notice there’s also multiple items on a single page, you can scroll down through, but there are also tabs on the left that edit different properties related to that question, including things like Show When We See our Logic Builder. So, there’s a lot of flexibility here and I recommend taking a look through those different tabs.

Most commonly, added a thank you page. It cannot be added to the first page of the online survey. Make sure your “From” address is actually a real email address, this is critical for good deliverability to ensure the email gets delivered properly and doesn’t get rejected by the receiving email provider, email service provider. And then, finally, use the Merge Helper on the left, it’s a Pulling Content from the survey and quickly add.

Publishing Your Online Survey

The last thing we’re going to do before we go into the Question and Answer and then after Question and Answer, we’ll wrap up, we’re right on schedule, is we’re going to talk about publishing. Now, here we have multiple pages and I have a lot of questions on one page. One quick programming, excuse me, one quick tip, is try and split your questions across multiple pages, because as somebody moves through the survey, every time they hit Next, we save their work. If you have everything on one page, all your eggs in one basket and they quit halfway through, we don’t have any of that work. But if you have them split up on a few different pages, you’re then saving that, they’re saving that work whenever they go through, so if they leave early, you still have a partial response of some of that data.

So, let’s talk about publishing. I’m going to go into the Publish tab. Now, the Publish tab presents you with, presents you with a prelaunch checklist. We’ve been playing with Preview already, diagnostics, you can run now or you can run when it launches and we can talk about that in a second. You can change the design, so Change Design will actually bring you into the Look and Feel. We mentioned that briefly early on, Edit Survey Look and Feel. This is the survey theme that we chose and you can even customize that theme with some quick adjustments as far as the color, make adjustments to the theme size, add your logo, show different elements, so these are all adjustments you can make through Theme. So, when you make those changes, save it, you’ll see them in Preview, so it’s always good to go back into your Preview and check them out.

The next items are really imprinted and very cool. Tested, have you tested your survey? You can send out a survey test link, which is an email, which provides a link to that individual for them to take the online survey, much like your respondent would. We also have the ability to generate survey test data. This is an automated tester that will create responses for your online survey, so you can easily take a look at how your data comes through and use that to test your survey in reporting. So, you can go ahead and export this randomly generated data, this test data and make sure that when you export it, you run your Summary Reports or any other reporting, the data is coming out as you expected. This is important because if it’s not, you can still make changes before you start collecting real data.

But what’s the So Special? Test links and test data live for 24 hours. They’re marked Special in the system, they don’t count towards your response limits and they allow you to do all the testing and they will automatically disappear after 24 hours. Now, once you’re all ready, you can launch it and you’re presented with diagnostics. This will give you a few different details: estimated length, how long it will take your survey respondents to take the survey, complexity, so how many complex question types do you have? Fatigue, do you have a lot of pages, a lot of complex questions on those pages? Is it going to wear them out?

And accessibility deals with those who are using screen raters or alternate devices, rather than just a keyboard and a mouse to browse the web and to view pages, so those who are visually impaired, for instance. And if you have any problems with accessibility, you’re using a question type, such as our Drag and Drop ranking that doesn’t match well with accessibility and that’s a concern for you, we’ll go ahead and present you with a warning.

So, I’m going to go ahead and hit continue because I’ve now launched the online survey. Launching it means it’s available for others to complete that survey. Once launched, you’re presented with all the different campaigns available to you. Now, it’s important to notice that at the very bottom, you have existing links and campaigns, we create one automatically for you. This is a link that you can quickly share, shoot it in an email, put it on your website and people can start filling out your survey. You can create any new ones you like, create additional web links, if you want to put links in different places and see which one’s generating more traffic, post to Twitter, use the website pop-up, pop-under, embed it into your page on your website, send it out through a MailChimp campaign, one of our partners or shoot out an email campaign, where we email it out through ourselves and you get a bit of tracking there for that email campaign. So, all of these are available to you. If you want to learn more about email campaigns, there’s a recording of a webinar and there’s, of course, tutorials on all of these other items here, including our Matrix to Decode.

So, that’s for publishing your survey. So, let’s go ahead and recap that. So, you can have multiple web links, you don’t have to be restricted to just one. And in those web links, and I didn’t dive into them too much, but in the web links, you can make changes and do additional branding, such as putting them on your own domain, so if you are mycompany.com, you can have surveys at mycompany.com at the Enterprise or Dedicated level. So, there’s all of these adjustments there and you can even make language adjustments.

If you want to make sure you make test data, whether it be test links or generate test data, that data will last for 24 hours and then I mentioned in the beginning, spread questions across multiple pages to ensure saving of their work every time they move between pages. All right? So this is to ensure that you collect as much data as possible from those who might not complete your online survey.

Questions & Answers

All right, so I’m going to go ahead and, before we go to our last item, we’re going to go through the Question and Answers. We’ve got quite a few questions here from the large number of attendees, so I’m going to go ahead and step through these really quickly.

So, the first question, somebody’s referring to a particular question they have on their survey, and the question is, “Do you know if you have a boundary issue on your property?” And their choices of answers is: yes, no or doubt. And so what they want to do, they wanted to know whether they were, if they choose “yes,” they want to get one set of questions, “no,” a different set of questions or doubt, a last set of questions.

That’s just using either our Show/Hide Logic or the Logic Builder we demonstrated that gives you the ability, if they said, “yes,” you’re going to jump them to this set of pages, “no,” this set of pages, so on and so forth. You can also just include those as questions below and use the In Page Logic. So, thanks so much for your question.

How do you specify a min/max value for numerical text field survey question?

So that’s a great question and I’ll actually bring back up an example here. So, I was talking about when you edit a particular survey question, you’re presented with a lot of tabs on the left. So, I’m going to go ahead and edit this, “What is your age?” question and on the left side, we have the ability to do validation. Now, here’s the validation for the data type where we already did, which is number. We even have an extra option to force it to be a whole number, but you’ll see we’ve automatically provided fields for min and max values. So, if the minimum is they are 1-year-old and the maximum is 123, they can go ahead and be added in here. If you want to get very advanced, we have our Advance Validation, which includes things like US phone number, verify email address, age in years, so there’s a lot of advance validation available, those are for if it’s not being met by any of our other options, the Advance Validation is something that you can get into. So, thanks so much for your question.

The next question is also related to validation and someone wants to accept only two digits, so when someone has a typo, 244 wouldn’t be accepted.

So, absolutely, so we have our min and max values is one way to do it, but that’s when if you wanted to do something where you were saying, “I’d like only two characters,” you can choose the Advance Validation. So this says a number one to four digits in length creates a special code. Now, here, we’re going to make one that’s one to two digits, as you requested, so it forces them to have a one digit or a two digit answer and then you can specify a message. So, this is kind of an advanced validation, it uses something called Regular Expressions and allows you to do the extra validation, so the power’s there for you.

Can you change the reporting value after launching the survey?

So, it’s not recommended to change reporting values at all because of the fact it’s going to split your data. If you have a question, imagine you had a question where you said, “I like it a lot,” and it’s five and then you go, “Oh, wait, I want that to be a ten,” now you’re going to have some data where it’s five and some where that’s a ten, it’s going to mess things up, so that’s why it’s important to make use of test data and generate test data and test links and make sure that all your scales are correct and working before you start collecting data. So, it’s definitely not recommended to change your reporting values after launch. It will allow you, but will warn you about three times before you do it.

Just a few more questions coming in and then we’ll be wrapping up with our last item.

If I include a consent form, can I make it so they have to choose to accept the consent form before participating?

So, absolutely. You can add a survey question, so maybe you add a new page and I can add a page in and, at the very beginning, you have a simple question that says, “Here’s an introduction” and then it has a one question, excuse me, a one answer checkbox, so like here, but there’s only one answer, so this, and it says, “I consent to complete this survey.” If you require that question, they must check the box to continue, if they don’t check the box, they don’t get to move forward and that box is their consent form. So it’s a great way to do it.

I recommend searching on SurveyGizmo.com, we have a search box there for consent or consent form. We have a little tutorial blurb on our blog we’ve written up a while ago that includes that example and a few others.

If page 1 is the first page of questions, is there a previous page of standard instructions or introduction?

Yeah, absolutely. So, just as I mentioned you can create a new page for consent form, you can insert a new page here, it’ll add that right in between one and two, we’re going to call this an Introduction, save it and remember, the next step is to reorder, so we’re going to click Reorder, because it’s not in the right place and we’re going to drag that up to the top and save it. And now, we’ve created a first page for our consent form or our introduction message and we’re going to use that Add Text or Image to add in that message.

All right, I’m going to try to get through these last one very quickly and then we’ll wrap up. If I don’t get to your question, I apologize, we’re going to wrap the webinar and if you do have any lingering questions, please get in touch with our support team, they can help you out.

Can I Show/Hide the entire survey if they don’t accept the consent form?

So, it’s much of the same, once again, no need to continue through the survey if they don’t accept the consent form.

How do we do the Show/Hide trigger in different pages?

So, there’s not Show/Hide triggers for different pages, that’s when you use the Logic Builder to jump them around.

Can a user partially take a survey and return back to the survey and complete? The question and answer, will they be saved?

So, absolutely. This is why it’s so important to have it on different, multiple pages, your questions. If they get to say like page 3 and they decide I want to save my work and come back to it later, if you didn’t send it out like an email invitation to them, you can go under Survey Settings and we have Save and Continue. This will turn on an item, if I go ahead and save this, it’s going to be at the top here, save settings, I’m going to go into Preview and show you what this looks like. So, you can see there’s a Save and Continue Later and they can put in their email verifying it’s saved and they’ll be emailed a link so they can return back to their work.

Remember, this will save all the work that they’ve submitted previously. So, they get to page 3, they can save there and they’ll have all their work from page 1 and 2 saved and they’ll be able to pick up right where they left off and it will return them back to page 3.

Can you export your data to SPSS for analysis?

Absolutely, that’s part of our reporting in our Enterprise and Dedicated plans, we have a custom SPSS exporter allowing you to do variables, set your variables, descriptions and even your data types are all available to you and that’s underneath our Reporting tab, which is something we’re not covering today. But we do have a Reporting webinar coming up later this week in two days. So, that’s under our recent Exports Reports Assess.

All right, Cindy did a post to her Face Book and just says

In your webinar can I put this on my Face Book?

Yes, even if you don’t want to use our built-in post, you can just grab the link, post it right to your Face Book wall and be all set.

All right, last questions here because I don’t want to keep people over.

For the other Please Specify, can you change the size of the textbox?

Yes, absolutely. When you’re editing a particular survey question, you can go ahead an edit that question under the Formatting tab, so if I go ahead and click Edit and then go to Formatting, you can see you can choose the size of the textbox with and make that adjustment. In the case of an Other Field, if we go down to the Other box and we hit Edit, it’ll also be under Formatting here for you. It’ll be an extra field at the bottom and it says, “ Textbox with for the Other textbox.”

Once surveys launch, can you make changes, then Re-Launch?

Once again, not recommended to make changes in your online survey and re-launch it, but if you want to, you can, you can add survey questions, don’t delete questions, but you can disable them. So, there is an option under Basic, excuse me, I believe it’s actually under Advanced, yup, to disable a question, so if you no longer want anyone to see that question, don’t delete it, that will make it hard or impossible for you to get that data back out that you’re already collected, but if you disable it, it will no longer be visible in the future. So you can make some changes after, but in general, it’s possible, not always recommended.

So, somebody else is asking about our built-in analysis and we do have all of our reporting. I recommend checking our Reporting webinar in two days. We have a recording of an old version if you needed it right now, But absolutely, we have built-in Summary Reports and analysis tools, built right into the tool.

Somebody’s asked about iPhone theme and web users. If you chose the iPhone or iPad theme, they’re meant for everybody right now. Coming up in the future, we’ll be offering the ability to have two different themes, one for mobile browsers, like tablets and phones and one theme that would go to everybody else. So you can have it differentiated. Right now, you’ll see that they’re both exactly, they would see the same one. So, look out for that in coming releases.

If emailing to respondents, how do we ensure they only complete it once?

That has to do with email invitations. I’m not going to answer that one right now. Check out our webinar recording on email invitations and it’ll talk about that. We have a Save and Continue feature built into that, as well.

The SurveyGizmo Survey Question Library

All right, that was all we’re going to cover for questions, so let’s go ahead and wrap up with a last item. So, we’re going to talk about one last thing, which is the Question Library and this will take all of two minutes to cover. But it will make your life easier if you’re building a lot of surveys.

So, the Question Library is not only an option on the left side that you can drag and drop something in, so if I can click here and I can drag in a question, drop it in, it’s going to look for a library, this is account-wide. The Question Library contains a few items. It contains some default questions that we’ve included that are kind of standard questions that anyone can make use of. So, we have a Human Resources survey, we have Ratings Comparison surveys, we have some general ones for you, such as the gender or year you were born. If you click plus, it will add this question directly to into the survey from the library. You even have an account-wide personal Question Library, any questions that you might have added. So, here we have a drag and drop ranking question that I saved a while ago. I can hit Plus here and it will go ahead and add that question to the survey. Once it’s done, I can close it and it will be added into the survey. So you can see it here, drag and drop ranking question is now within the survey.

If I have a question that I like and I’d like to reuse it and you’d like to save it to your library, simply edit that question and you’ll notice in the bottom right, we have the ability to copy the Question Library by placing a check and then hitting Save. When you do so, it will go ahead and save that question to your library. So, you can access it later. And to show you what that drag and drop ranking that I added from library looks like, I’m going to go ahead and reload my Preview, scroll down and you can see the drag and drop ranking question in action.

Now, what if you want to make changes to what’s in your library or remove things? There’s a My Libraries tab at the top. Now, this provides you with both Files and Image Library, a Theme Library, as well as a Question Library and the Question Library is what we’re interested in in this example. Here are all the items in your Question Library. You can edit them, copy them or remove them, as you’d like and this way, you can edit your library. Remember, these are account-wide, so anything you create here can be used in any survey, quiz, form that you create at a later point in time.

Well, that’s it, you’re now a survey rock star, right? I hope you’ve enjoyed this webinar on the Basics: Creating Your First Survey.