Survs - Help

We love to help!

Have a question?

You’ve come to right place! Whether you're a new or an experienced Survs’s user, we’ll try to answer all your questions. To speed things up, use the menu on the left to jump right to the section that best describes your question. If you do not find your answers there, please get in touch. We’ll get back to you within a few hours.

Surveys

The Surveys page gathers all your surveys in one place. You can control the ordering and number of surveys to display using the menus on the top. Survs will remember this setting even after you have logged out.

Besides providing some basic information about each survey, such as their status, last event and number of responses, this page is the cornerstone of all your survey-managing tasks. From here you can quickly jump to:

• Edit your survey.
• Distribute your survey by creating different channels to collect your answers.
• Analyze your survey results, either by filtering the responses, browsing individual answers or just exporting the results to be analyzed somewhere else.

From this page you can also perform some quick actions on your surveys using the "More actions..." menu:

• Preview opens a new browser window displaying the survey just like your respondents will.
• Duplicate creates a new survey with the same style and structure of the survey of the original.
• Delete erases your survey along with all of its channels and results.
• Share allows you to share your surveys with other users. When you share a survey template with someone, only the survey’s structure and questions will be visible. Responses will not be shared.
• Language gives you the ability to customize the language used for various survey elements. You can choose from a few predefined languages or write your own.

Top

Edit survey

The Edit page allows you to control all aspects of your survey. At the top you'll find some tabs, each of them allows you to do different things.

Let's walk through these from left to right.

Edit

The Edit tab is where you build and edit your survey. A survey consists of pages, questions and elements. You'll use the menu on the left to add these to your survey.

Pages

Pages allow you to divide your survey into groups of related questions. Your respondents can navigate back and forth on these pages while answering your survey. This is great to keep things organized and keep your respondents focused on one topic.

While building your survey you can also keep focused on a specific page by selecting the page you're working on from the menu on the upper left.

Pages can also be used to add some logic to your survey. Adding logic to a question allows you to establish rules that determine to which page your respondent will go next based on his response.

Questions

The essential element of a survey. Currently you have the following types of questions to choose from:

• Single Answer (Vertical, Horizontal or Menu)
• Multiple Answer (Vertical or Horizontal)
• Open Ended Text (One line, One or more lines with prompt or essay)
• Matrix (One answer per row or Multiple answers per row)

Each of these types of questions can be customized. The available options for each type will be shown once you select the type you want.

You can also click on the "Example (open/close)" link to quickly grasp the type of question selected.

Elements

You can add the following elements anywhere you please:

• Heading
• Text
• Image
• Spacer

Elements are a great complement to your questions they can be used to give some contextual explanation to your respondents, improve the appearance of your survey, add some branding elements, etc.

Options

The Options tab allows you to change the title and navigation labels, and to choose if you want to show the numbering of pages and questions or not. You can also decide if the question numbering shall be continuous throughout the entire survey or if numbering shall start at the beginning of each page.

Reorder

Reordering pages or questions is incredibly easy. Just drag and drop the question or page to wherever you want.

Note that you can only reorder your survey while it is closed. You must close all of the survey’s channels before being able to reorder anything.

Theme

With the Theme tab selected you can customize your survey's style. Choose from one of the existing default themes or create your own.

Each survey has a custom theme associated with it. You can edit this custom theme as you like. It will only be available for the current survey.

If, after developing a custom theme, you feel like using it on other surveys you can do so by saving it as a template. You can apply this template to the desired surveys afterwards.

Note that your changes are reflected immediately, just change any property and see how it looks right away.

Language

The Language tab allows you to change the language of the survey navigation labels and of various messages directed to your respondent.

Just pick from one of the predefined languages or create your own. You can always save your work by choosing "Save as template" and use it on other surveys.

Top

Distribute

After you've finished building your survey, it is time to distribute it.

To distribute your survey you’ll have to create one or more channels to collect your responses. The Distribute page is where this is accomplished.

You can select from three different types of channels:

• Web Link
• HTML Code
• Email Invitation

All of these types of channels have different settings settings to choose from, so you can customize their behavior.

Note also that you can have more than one channel of the same type for a single survey (depending on your account plan). For example: if you wanted to survey a school about its classroom conditions you could create two separate Web Link channels for the same survey. You would then pass along one channel's URL for the students and the other for the teachers. Later on, you could analyze both channel results together or independently.

Web Link

The most simple and common channel of all. As the name suggests, this channel provides you with a URL that you can forward to your audience. They will access the survey simply by opening this URL in a Web browser.

HTML Code

An HTML Code channel is most useful when you want to collect responses from your website visitors.

This channel provides you with a few lines of HTML code that you can embed in your site. The code you'll be given depends on the channel type you choose:

• iFrame opens the survey directly from within a Web page.
• Popup opens the survey in a new window when visitors enter your site.
• Popup with invitation is similar to the above, but instead of displaying the survey immediately in the new window it displays an invitation instead.

Email Invitation

Sometimes you'll have a list of email addresses from your audience. By using an Email Invitation channel you'll be able to send an email to each of those addresses with a custom message soliciting their response. Please note that the use of this channel implies that your audience has agreed to receive this type of solicitations from you.

When creating this type of channel you'll be given the opportunity to choose whether the responses will be given anonymously or not. If you choose a non-anonymous channel, when analyzing your survey you'll be able to know which email address corresponds to each respondent.

After creating the channel you'll have to add contacts. Contacts consist of an email address (required), a first and last name, and notes. You can add them one by one or add multiple contacts at once.

Once you have uploaded your contacts, you can write one or more emails to be sent to them. For each of these emails you can specify who will receive them:

• New/Unsent Send to everyone who hasn't received an email message yet.
• Not Responded Send to everyone who has received an email message, but has not yet responded.
• Responded Send to everyone who has responded.
• Everyone Send to everyone in your contact list.

Settings

For each channel you can set up various settings to control some of the channel's behaviors.

Note that the ability to use some of these settings depends on your account plan please consult the Pricing (not available yet) page for the differences between plans.

Channel options

• Prevent multiple responses When this setting is selected a respondent will only be able to answer the survey once. You may choose the filtering method from one of the three types of filtering: cookie-based (recommended for most situations), IP-based or both simultaneously.
• Allow responses to be edited Allows a respondent to edit a previously submitted response, even after the survey has been completed. Note that even with this setting disabled a respondent can edit their response as long as they haven't completed the survey.
• "Thank you" page Shows a thank you message to the respondent after completing the survey.
• Survey completion Redirects the respondent browser to a given web page when finishing the survey.
• Anonymous responses When this setting is on, no information about the respondent is recorded. This includes the IP address and the email address on Email invitation channels.

Channel restrictions:

• Cut off date and time Automatically closes the channel on the defined time and date.
• Limit number of responses Automatically closes the channel when the number of responses reaches a certain value.
• Password protection Asks for a password before allowing the respondent to see the survey.
• IP blocking Either prevents a set of IPs to access the survey or allows just a set of IPs to access it.

Top

Analyze

The Analyze page is where all your work comes to fruition. All results presented here are updated in real time.

Summary

The Summary tab presents you with a global view of your survey results. At the top you have various statistics about your survey completion status, and below a per question view of your results.

You can use the menus at the very top to show: only questions belonging to a specific survey page; only results regarding respondents that match a given set of filters; or results regarding respondents from a given set of channels.

This is also where you can export or share your results online.

Respondents

The Respondents tab allows you to view responses individually. Once again, just like in the Summary tab, you can use the menus on the top to focus your attention on a specific set of respondents/questions.

Below these menus you have some information about the current respondent, namely: their IP (or email if the respondent answered through a non-anonymous Email Invitation channel), the channel used, the starting and last modification date, and the time the respondent spent answering the survey.

You are also given the ability to exclude a respondent. By excluding a respondent his answer will no longer be taken into account in the Summary tab. You can always revert this action by navigating to that respondent's page and including him again.

Filters

The Filters tab provides you with a flexible tool to filter your respondents and focus your analytical eye on various subsets.

You can create two different types of filters: simple or expression filters.

You create simple filters based on a respondent's answer to a single question. For example, take the following question and options:

You could create a filter named "snowboards" that selects all the respondents that answered "Snowboard" to that question.

Expression filters allow you to combine simple filters in a complex expression. For example if you wanted to create a filter that selected respondents who snowboard and have their own gear you'd create an expression filter like the one depicted below:

Note also that there's a real time validator to assure you of the correctness of the expression.

Exporting data

Survs has the capability of exporting data in industry standard formats, enabling you to analyze your data offline or with the help of specialized applications.

To export a survey's data go to its Analyze page and, with the Summary tab selected click Export link located on the top right corner. Then select the type of data you want, the file format details, and press the "Generate File" button. The file will be generated and when it's done an option to download the file will be presented.

Survs can export a summary of all the survey answers or detailed information about each individual respondent.

The data can be exported in the following file formats: Microsoft Excel or CSV (Comma-Separated Values).

If you choose to export the individual respondent information, you'll be given the option of exporting the answers in text or in numerical values. The latter is useful if you want to import your data to popular statistical software applications, such as SPSS. In that case, we recommend using the CSV format, although Excel can also be used.

If you choose to export using numerical values, there are two extra features you may use to further tailor your file:

• Expand columns Answers to some types of questions (e.g. Single Answer) can be compacted into a single column. Turning this option on will force one column per answer.
• Short labels Some statistical applications impose constraints on the length of variable names. Usually, the column headers of the exported files contain the question or answer titles. Turning this option on will replace them with short automatically generated labels.

Top

Accounts

Survs is a collaborative application. This means that among other things, accounts can be include multiple users.

The Accounts page gives you an overview of all the accounts you belong to. You can quickly see the total number and the number of open surveys, as well as the number of members and the current account plan. The account plan determines which features are available.

This page is also the gateway to others where you can manage an account and see an account's activity.

Account Management

By clicking on the account name you'll be taken to a page listing all the current account members.

The most prominent column of the member's table is the roles column. Assuming different roles allows you to have some control over who can do what inside an account. Only the account owner and manager(s) can edit them.

The following table summarizes which privileges are associated with each role:

	Viewer	Editor	Distributor	Analyzer	Manager	Owner
Surveys
Preview surveys
Create, edit and delete surveys	-		-	-	-
Share and import survey templates or themes	-		-	-	-
Messages
Send messages
Distribute
Create, delete, open and close channels	-	-		-	-
Clear a channel's responses	-	-		-	-
Analyze
View results	-	-	-		-
Share and export results	-	-	-		-
Create, edit and delete filters	-	-	-		-
Account
Edit roles	-	-	-	-
Assign manager role	-	-	-	-	-
Invite and remove users	-	-	-	-
Quit account

As you can see, each role gives a user the privileges you'd expect from its name.

Finally, if you're the account owner, you can also rename or close the account.

5.2 Account Activity

The activity page lists various events concerning the account and its surveys.

If you wish to see all the survey activity or just the activity from a specific survey you can use the filters available on the top.

Lastly, but not least, you can subscribe an RSS feed for these events. If you find yourself revisiting the activity page often, it's a sign that you should use this. RSS feeds are a great way to keep track of the latest happenings in your accounts.

Note also that when you subscribe a feed it will take into account the filtering options you have selected. This allows you to keep focused on the activity that most interests you.

Top

Themes

The Themes page allows you to browse Survs's default themes and manage all of your own themes.

You can customize almost every aspect of a theme, such as:

• the background color of the page, header or body
• the font color, size and family
• the survey's width and margins

You can also view any theme in a different browser window by clicking the "Preview »" link on the top.

Finally, if you're really proud of a theme you have created, why not share it with other users? Just click the "Share" link and you'll be given a URL you can spread to showcase your talent :).

When others open the URL they'll be able to import your theme to their account. By importing a theme users are effectively copying it to their account any subsequent changes made to the shared theme will not be reflected in their copies.

Top