Traditional Surveys - Introduction

smartcrowds enables organisations to issue surveys to gather feedback from others, and use the insights gained to make sure that meaningful change happens - all within the same platform.

Surveys can be issued to employees who are members of Crowds, to lists of named people internal or external to the organisation, or they can be published as a public URL that anyone can respond to.

Two different types of surveys can be issued in smartcrowds - Idea Surveys which are used to get feedback from people on an idea that looks interesting and will help inform decision-making on whether to progress an idea, and Classic Surveys, which are used to get feedback from people on any topic.

This article focuses on the use of Classic Surveys in smartcrowds.

Like everything else in smartcrowds, the Crowd is the starting place for getting things moving - in this case, organising and managing your surveys.

Any number of Crowds can be created for your surveys - for example, a Crowd for surveys that will be issued to all employees, a Crowd for surveys that will be issued to staff in the Operations Department, or a Crowd that is used for surveying your customers for product feedback.

By creating Crowds to manage your surveys, you can benefit from the pre-built audience groups that comes with your Crowd (the Crowd members) every time you create and issue a new survey within that Crowd.

A Crowd for managing surveys will normally look something like this:

smartcrowds Survey Groups are created within Crowds to enable you to group surveys that share a similar broad topic together in the same place. Any number of Survey Groups can be created in a Crowd - for example the 'Annual Surveys' and 'Diversity and Inclusion Surveys' groups illustrated above within the 'Whole Company - Surveys and Consultations' Crowd.. You can give these group a title, description and image to help you recognise them easily.

To add a new Survey Group, tap the Add Survey Group button, and give your group a title, description and suitable image.

Note: you don't have to call these groups 'Survey Groups' - if you want to use a different label for this in your Crowd, you can change it in the Crowd Settings page. You can also change how you refer to your surveys here too - for example you could use the label "Consultation" instead of "Survey".

Once you've created one or more Groups for managing surveys of a similar topic together in one place, you can start adding some Survey Items into a Group.

A Survey Item is used to record some basic details (usually Title and Description, but you can add more fields if you want) about a specific survey, or a series of surveys (see below), that you will run.

In the example below, 3 Survey Items have been added into the Diversity and Inclusion Surveys group: one for a 'Gender in the Workplace' survey, one for a 'Belonging and Inclusion' survey and one for a 'Diversity in our Business' survey.

Whilst you can use a Survey Item for a one-off survey that you might never run again, a more effective approach is often to use it to store multiple instances of the same survey series together:- for example you might want to send out a 'Fitness in the Workplace' survey on a yearly basis. In this case, you could add a 'Fitness in the Workplace' Survey Item, from which you can then go on to issue the Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 instances of that survey in due course. This approach makes it easier to find and browse all related surveys in a series, and also faster to publish the same survey again in the next quarter.

The example below shows a 'Fitness in the Workplace' Survey Item which has been used to manage a series of surveys. In this example, 2 instances of the survey (for Q1 and Q2) have been launched so far.

For information on adding a brand new survey and sending it to your chosen audience, and creating Survey Templates for your survey, refer to the articles: