Creating a survey

Create a community survey and encourage community members to respond with their opinions.

About this task

The type of questions you ask in a survey determines the type of feedback you get. Consider the following question types when you construct your survey:

  • Yes/no questions categorize responses into groups, for example, people who use a specific product.
  • Multiple-choice questions contain three or more mutually exclusive responses.
  • Open-ended questions allow participants to respond in their own words. Because these questions can be time-consuming to answer and difficult to analyze, they are most effective at the end of a survey.

Procedure

Create the survey
  1. Open the Community to which you want to add the survey and click Surveys > Create Survey.
  2. Enter a survey name and description on the Create Survey page and click Continue.
  3. Enter questions in your survey, click Add Question, and enter the question text in the Question: field.
  4. Select a question type from the Type: drop-down field. You can select from the following question types:
    • Multiple choice: One answer only (respondents select one answer from a multiple choice list)
    • Multiple choice: Multiple answers (respondents select multiple answers from a multiple choice list)
    • Drop-down menu (respondents select one answer from a drop-down menu)
    • Text answer: One line (respondents enter a free-form answer on one line)
    • Text answer: Multiple lines (respondents enter a free-form answer on multiple lines)
    • Number (respondents enter a number)
    • Date (respondents enter a date)
    • Currency (respondents enter a currency type)
    • Check Box (respondents tick a check box)
  5. For multiple choice and drop-down questions, you can modify questions as follows:
    • Use the Add iconAdd icon to add more answer options.
    • Use the Delete iconDelete icon to delete answer options.
    • Use the Up and Down arrows to change the order of answer options.
  6. Click More Actions > Response Collection Settings to set survey settings such as the survey completion date and how many times respondents can take the survey.
  7. Click More Actions > Preview and check the survey layout, then click Save.
Start the survey
  1. Click Start Survey to start the survey.
    Tip: If you are a community owner, you can designate your survey as a featured survey. Featured surveys are prominently displayed on the community.

    Community members can now see your survey (with a reminder of the survey closing date) listed under Surveys on the Community Overview page. The survey also appears within activity stream listings, such as home page, views, and community updates. Community members must click the title of an active survey to participate in the survey.

What to do next

When your survey completes you can start to analyze survey results. See Analyzing survey results .