Table Content
Whether you’re conducting market research, looking for feedback from your staff members, or following-up with customers on their experience, surveys are a quick and easy way to connect with people and gather vital information.
By choosing LimeSurvey, you can either choose one of our many ready-to-use yet customizable survey templates, or build your own survey from scratch. No matter which option is best for you, here are the steps you need to get started.
Create Question Groups
After choosing your template and launching your bespoke survey, the first step is to create question groups. These groups keep questions of a similar nature or theme together, and if you have multiple groups, the feature displays all questions within each group together by default.
After naming your groups, you can enter a description for each group that will be shown to survey participants, explaining the questions in that group, set questions to appear in a random order, and set relevance equations that make it simple to repeat a set of questions several times. For example, if a family includes two students at your school and you need the parents to answer the same questions about each student, you can create a relevance equation that ensures the questions are asked based on the number of students indicated earlier in the survey.
Add Questions
Once you’ve created your question groups, it’s time to add in your questions! Using either the Survey Structure or Add Questions features, you can create new questions and use the Questions Editor to choose the type of question you’d like to include. After you’ve assigned the question to a question group and indicated whether the question is mandatory, save your settings and add more!
Activate your survey
After adding your questions to your question groups, you’re nearly ready to activate your survey. To do this, select the settings tab, click overview, and choose “Activate this survey.” You’ll have the opportunity to choose your general survey settings –once that’s done, click save and active survey!
From there, you can choose whether your survey is open-access, which allows everyone with the survey link to take it, or closed-access, which requires a unique survey invite for participation.
When it’s time for you to end your survey, simply select “Stop this survey,” and then confirm the choice by clicking “Deactivate survey.”
Distribute Your Survey
If you’ve chosen an open-access survey, you can share the survey URL by visiting the Overview page of your survey under the settings tab, choose the share survey section and you will find the link of your survey. You can also click the open sharing panel button. You will find ways your survey via QR code or social channels.
If you’ve chosen a closed-access survey, you can activate the survey participants table. This table enables you to invite participants, keep track of who has completed the survey, and ensure each person participates only one time.
To create the table, navigate to settings, choose survey menu, click survey participants, and then click initialize participant table. Use the survey participants table to generate unique codes for each participant.
Once you’ve created your participant table, you can import participant data, and then use the table to manage survey participants and track participation status.
Collect Responses
When it’s time for you to collect survey responses, you can choose whether or not the responses are anonymous. The default option is not to make the responses anonymous, which means they are matched with the information from your survey participant table. If you choose to make responses anonymous, there is no way to connect answers and participants – but you will always be able to view individual responses entered by survey participants.
To monitor responses in real-time, click the responses table from the top toolbar, choose responses & statistics, and then click “Display responses” from the top toolbar of the response summary page. From there, you can use an array of filters to choose how to display the responses.
To ensure the integrity and quality of your survey data, use the check data integrity function to vet consistency and determine redundancy. This function looks for possible errors that might exist between the response tables and survey tables, or between the token list and the central participant database.
Analyze Results
Once all responses are in and your survey has closed, it’s time to dig in and analyze the results. With LimeSurvey’s analysis tools, you can create simple and complex statistics using the response table and field summary, filter the data as needed, and generate graphs and charts. To access these tools, click "Responses & statistics," then choose the function that you want to use.
For additional external analysis, you can export your survey data in a variety of formats that are compatible with tools such as SPSS, R, STATA, and more. To export survey data, find “Responses” from the top toolbar, select “Responses & statistics,” click “Export,” and then select your desired export format. To save any graphs and charts that you’ve generated using LimeSurvey’s tools, use the “Export images” function and choose your desired format.
With LimeSurvey, you can quickly and easily create and customize surveys that suit your needs. For more information on getting started or using our vast array of tools, check out our robust Help Center or start your own survey now.