Online surveys (formerly BOS)
Powerful, flexible online surveys
Features explained
Design
Choice of question types:
- Multiple choice (multiple answer)
- Multiple choice (single answer)
- Selection list
- Free text (single line)
- Free text (multiple lines)
- Date and/or time
- Scale/rank
- Grid
Range of customisable themes
- Choose from a range of different colour schemes and fluid or fixed width layouts for your survey.
- Personalise it with your own background image.
Response validation
- Define the format of a ‘valid’ response, i.e. the way a respondent is allowed to answer a question. For example, you can set a free-text question to only accept properly formatted email or website addresses, postcodes, etc., or to allow only numbers or letters, or a certain minimum and/or maximum number of characters to be entered. For multiple choice/multiple answer questions, you can set the minimum and/or maximum number of boxes that must be ticked.
Media embedding
- Incorporate videos, sound clips or images into your survey (these have to be hosted on an external service that is openly accessible, e.g. YouTube).
Respondent screening
- Automatically screen out respondents who don’t match a specific profile and redirect them to a message or to another website (including a different online surveys survey).
Routing (skip logic)
- Have respondents automatically skip one or more pages that are not applicable to them. Routing can also be used to make surveys more investigative by branching off into a sequence of pages that are tailored to each particular group of respondents.
Survey flow map and diagnostics
- Online surveys performs automatic checks on your survey to make sure the structure is valid before you launch the survey. Any problems will be highlighted in a flow map allowing you to quickly find and fix errors. The survey flow map is particularly useful for visualising different routes through your survey.
Question pre-population
- Pre-populate questions with information you already have about individuals or groups. This information can be shown to or hidden from respondents when they complete the survey.
Completion options
- Add a progress bar, ‘finish later’ button or completion certificate to your survey, and control whether or not to allow respondents to go back and amend previous pages.
Multi-language surveys
- Create a survey in multiple languages and merge the responses afterwards. Non-Latin characters are supported and the respondent interface (buttons, instructions, etc.) are available in the following languages: Dutch, French, Gaelic, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Welsh. The admin interface remains in English.
Survey import/export
- Export your survey structure for easy archiving or sharing with other online surveys users.
Printable PDF
- Download a PDF of your survey to send others for review, include in reports, or collect paper-
based responses.
Custom logo
- Customise your surveys by including your organisation’s logo.
Permission sharing
- Collaborate with other online surveys users (within or outside of your organisation) by sharing access to your survey with them. You also grant somebody limited access, e.g. to only allow them to copy, edit or preview the survey.
Distribution
Customised and secure survey links
- All surveys have SSL encrypted web addresses as standard to protect your data from being intercepted by third parties. Choose your individual address prefix when you sign up.
Survey password and access control
- Restrict participation in your survey by setting up a survey password, by assigning individual usernames and passwords to each respondent, or by creating personalised survey links that can only be completed once. You can store respondents’ credentials to monitor or track respondents, or discard them to keep your data anonymous.
Auto-close option
- Automatically close a survey when a specific number of responses have been received.
Respondent redirection
- Automatically send early or late respondents to another website.
Live survey editing
- Amend your survey after it has been launched (this is limited to certain aspects of survey editing).
Survey embedding
- Incorporate your survey into your own website.
Social media sharing
- Easily distribute your survey link via Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
Email distribution
- Send email notifications and reminders of surveys to lists of respondents within online surveys.
Analysis
Live monitoring of responses
- Access and analyse responses as soon as they start coming in.
Response exclusion
- Find and exclude erroneous, duplicate or offensive responses.
Simple and advanced filtering
- Create and combine filters based on response date, questions and/or answer given. You can save filters as ‘views’ for later use or to share with other online surveys users.
Data display options
- Choose to display your data as tables, bar charts or pie charts and download individual charts as images to include in reports, etc.
Additional statistics
- Automatically calculate median, mean and variance statistics.
PDF download
- Download your data view as a PDF for printing and easy sharing.
Data exporting for MS Excel and SPSS
- Download your data ready for further analysis in standard statistical software packages.
Collaborative analysis
- Share your full data set or a pre-defined filtered view with other online surveys users.
Benchmarking groups
- Participate in national benchmarking surveys and compare your results to those of other organisations.