smartcrowds isn't only about Ideas and Innovation. Since improvement stems from all types of input from people, the use of Surveys as means of obtaining feedback is an important part of the platform.
In smartcrowds, Surveys can be used to get feedback on a specific Idea which is covered elsewhere, but they can also be used to kick-start the process of learning what people think about various topics in a standalone capacity - in other words, not connected with a Idea.
For optimum ease of use, we recommend that standalone Surveys are conducted in a Crowd that has been created specifically for the purpose of running surveys. In such a Crowd, it often makes sense to organise similar types of surveys together into logical groupings that make them easier to find and manage.
Examples of logical groupings for surveys in an 'All Organisation' Crowd might be 'Health and Safety Surveys", "Employee Satisfaction Surveys" or "Learning and Development Surveys".
The steps below will help you create your new Survey Groups with just a few short actions.
1. Choose your Crowd
Your Survey Group will need to be in an appropriate Crowd, so find the Crowd that you want to use (Browse-> Crowds-> My Crowds), or create a new Crowd if there isn't one that that meets your needs (you'll need the Crowd Creator privilege for this)
Full details on managing Crowds are covered in this article.
Don't forget to set the Collection Type and Item Label for your Crowd to something appropriate to Surveys - for example:
Collection Type: 'Survey Topic', 'Survey Area', 'Type' etc.
Item Label: 'Survey', 'Consultation', 'Feedback Form' etc.
The Collection Type and Item Label that you have set for your Crowd will be inherited for all Groups that are added to that Crowd.
2. Add your Group
All you need to do now is create your new Group.
Since this Group will be used specifically for Surveys rather than Ideas, there a few key Group settings and options listed below that you should know about to get best use out of it.
(You can also check out this article for full details on how to add a new Group to a Crowd).
Title & Description: Give your Group an easily recognisable title and a description that helps people understand what type of Surveys will be published in this Group.
Image: Give your group an image that matches the title and description as closely as possible to help people find and understand the Group easily.
Managers: You'll need to decide who is going to manage any Assessments that might arise from feedback from the Surveys that are run.
Currently smartcrowds will require one or more Moderators, Assessors and Authorisers to be selected, but please note that only Assessors are currently used within the Survey process. We recommend however that the same people who are added as Assessors are also added as Moderators and Authorisers.
Status: This will be set to 'Draft' initially, so that you can create the Group without other people seeing it. When you're ready to let other people know about it, you'll need to 'Publish' the Group.
Restrict add Survey to Group Owners and Assessors: smartcrowds is designed to enable anyone to add their own contributions (Ideas etc.) into the system, but since an organisation will not want everyone to be able to create and publish a new Survey, this option should be set to 'On' to ensure than only Group Owners and Assessors have the capability of creating and publishing new Surveys.
Note that when the option is set to 'On', the Group will NOT appear on the smartcrowds Call to Action page, however Group Owners and Assessors will be able to add new Surveys to the Group via the relevant Crowd Profile page.
Submitter can edit Survey after assessment: Sometimes the person who has created and published a Survey may wish to make a change to the Survey Description after it has been issued, or even after some Assessments/Findings have been recorded. Set this option to 'On' to allow changes to Survey Descriptions to take place at any time.
Assessors can edit Survey after assessment: Sometimes an assessor who is recording Assessments/Findings from a Survey may wish to make a change to the Survey Description after those Assessments have been recorded. Set this option to 'On' to allow changes to Survey Descriptions to take place at any time.
End Date: Since this Group may be used to add new Surveys at any time (i.e. it doesn't have a deadline for new Surveys to be added), leave this field blank.
Submission Requires a Decision: smartcrowds has an 'out-of-the-box' workflow for Ideas and Innovation Challenges that requires Decision making to take place.
This workflow is not relevant to Surveys therefore this option should be set to 'Off' when adding a Survey Group.
Send Assessment Notifications Manually: By default smartcrowds will send an Assessment request notification to the pool of assessors for the Group as soon as a new contribution is added to ensure that all contributors get timely feedback. This feature has been designed for Ideas and Innovation Challenges, and is not relevant to Surveys.
To ensure that automated Assessment requests are NOT sent when a Survey is created/added, this option should be set to 'On'.
