Tutorial: Creating a New Survey

This tutorial will show you how to create a survey and how to add questions and actions. After you create a survey, you can modify its design and layout with this tutorial on templates.

Step 1: Click the Button

When you log into SurveyGizmo, you’ll see a ‘Create Survey’ button in the left column. Click it.

Note: Or, from anywhere in SurveyGizmo, you can click “All Your Surveys” in the main menu to get to this page.

Step 2: New Survey Options

You need to name your survey and decide if you want to start from a blank slate or use a template.

On this page:

• Name your survey. (Trust us, if you create a bazillion surveys, this will save you a lot of clicking when you go looking for your survey results.)
• Use a template or copy a survey if you have one. (You can start from scratch by choosing ‘blank survey’ — but why recreate the wheel? We have plenty of templates from which to choose.)

After you have finished creating your survey, click the button called ‘Create This Survey’.
For this demo, we have chosen the template called ‘Basic Survey Template’. It has samples of most question types to help you get started.

Step 3: The Survey Editor

This is the survey editor. When we talk about building a survey, this is where all the action is.

In fact, this is the most important page in our application. Sadly, it’s also a little confusing — we *are* working on that and would love any feedback you can give us.

Because this page is a little crowded with actions, let’s take a second to get familiar with the different components on the page.

Navigating around the SurveyBuilder

The Menu Bar

You can use the menu bar to tab through different pages for building a survey.

Overview

This page gives you statistics about how well your survey is doing.

Edit Survey

This is the active tab shown in the image. The sub-navigation links (those under the main tab) let you edit your survey questions, re-order questions using drag & drop, and change the visual look and feel (colors, layout, etc.) of your survey. “Setup” lets you change the name of your survey, the closed message and a few other options.

Publishing

This tab gives you the link your survey will be published on. It also lets you change that link to make it look nicer (the default URLs are short… but random). Publishing also lets you cut and paste code to embed your survey in a blog or web page.

Email Invites

This tab lets you upload contacts from a spreadsheet and email invitations to them. It also lets you send out reminders (because some people take their grand old time filling out your survey) and ‘followups’ (eg. thank you emails).

Reporting

Reporting lets you do some very cool stuff. You can browse your responses, edit them (not wise if you’re running a statistically valid survey — but great for web forms) and view reports. It’s also where you can export your data.

Launch & Preview

These two links found on the right side of the menu bar let you quickly ‘Launch/Publish’ your survey or preview it the way a customer or respondent would see it.

Important Note: The survey editor doesn’t show your survey *exactly* the way it will appear to the outside world. That’s why we have the preview link.

Step 4: Add a Question

Adding a question is simple enough. Click the “Add Question” link above the page you want to modify.

You can add text/html/headers or images by clicking “Add text/images”.

“Add actions” lets you add auto-responders and page logic.
The next page asks what type of question you want to add to the page.

On this page:

• Type the text of the question you are going to ask. (Tip: If you want to format the question with color, choose the ‘advanced editor’ radio button at the bottom of this page.)
• Choose the type of question you want to use. This will cause other options to appear on the page. (Fill those out too, if you can.)
• Click the “Add Question” button to bring you back to the editor. Now you’ll see the question you just added.

Repeat this step to add as many questions as you like to a page. Clicking the “Add Page” button will add a page to the survey. You can add as many pages as you like :-)