Surveys and polls
Ask your members something, once
The word "survey" appeared nowhere on the previous version of this website, for a feature that has five question types and a results export. Here it is, including the part about anonymity that most products would leave out.
- Question types
- Five
- Questions per survey
- Up to twenty
- Responses
- One per member, final
- Shipped state
- Off; switch it on in Settings
Building one
Five question types and an opening and closing date#
An administrator writes the survey as a list of up to twenty questions: single choice, multiple choice, short text up to 500 characters, long text up to 4,000, and a rating from one to five. Any question can be required.
The survey itself has an opening date, a closing date and an anonymity switch. Members answer it from the member area, once, and responses are throttled to twenty an hour so a scripted flood is not interesting. Results have their own admin screen with a CSV export.
The honest bit
What "anonymous" actually means here#
Every response stores the member id, always, whether or not the survey is marked anonymous. It has to: that is how the software knows a member has already answered, and the database enforces it with a unique index.
What the anonymous switch does is suppress the member and batch columns on the results screen and in the export. That is a real and useful thing. It is not the same as the response being untraceable.
Say this, not that. Safe to tell your members: "your name is not shown with your answers." Not safe: "responses are anonymous", "we cannot tell who said what", or anything that promises the record does not exist. If you need genuinely untraceable answers, for a vote of no confidence or a complaint about a committee member, use something else for that one question.
After the survey
Results are yours to publish, not the product to broadcast#
Members never see results in the member area. No aggregate, no charts, no comparison with other people. The results page and its CSV export are admin-only, which means the committee reads them first and decides what to say.
The natural next step is a news post or an email campaign summarising what came back. That is a deliberate shape rather than a missing feature, but it does mean somebody has to do the writing.
Questions about surveys#
Is an anonymous survey really anonymous?
No. It is pseudonymous, and the difference matters. The member id is always stored against a response, because that is how the one-response rule is enforced. Ticking anonymous hides the member and batch columns in the admin results and in the export. So "your name is not shown with your answers" is true. "Nobody can ever know who said this" is not.
Can members see the results?
No. There is no aggregate view, no percentage bars and no see-how-others-answered screen anywhere in the member area. Results live on an admin page and in a CSV export, so publishing them is something a committee does deliberately, in a news post.
Can somebody change their answer?
No. One response per member, enforced twice over, with no editing, no partial save and no coming back to finish later. Write short surveys and say in the introduction that the answers are final.
What question types are there?
Five: single choice, multiple choice, short text up to 500 characters, long text up to 4,000, and a rating from one to five. Each question can be marked required, and a survey holds up to twenty.
Why is the module off when we install it?
Because most associations do not run a survey in their first month, and a member area with an empty section in it looks broken. Turn it on in Settings when you have something to ask.
Try a survey from both sides
Answer one as a member on the demo, then open the results screen in the admin panel and see exactly what a committee sees.