The practical guide to launching your SurveyMonkey Survey

So you’ve read the ten steps you need to consider when using SurveyMonkey for your research and are ready to dive in. Here’s your practical step-by-step guide on how to create a survey using SurveyMonkey.

The Step-by-Step guide to setting up and launching your survey

Use this section alongside your Survey Monkey screen to help guide you through each of the steps you need to undertake a good quality Survey using SurveyMonkey.

1. Design your survey: what are the options?

SurveyMonkey really have thought of everyone. From the experienced researcher who can write from scratch, import their pre-prepared questionnaire or copy a previous one, through to the complete novice wondering ‘how to create a free survey in SurveyMonkey?’, with options to ‘build it for me’ or start from a template.

Templates provide a rich resource for non-experts building a survey as they give access to questionnaire designs created by experts in the field. Experts not only in writing surveys in general but of specific subject matter, be it Customer Satisfaction or product testing. This mitigates the potential risks when fielding a survey as a non-expert and ensures that the data you collect is robust in support of your business objectives. This is important as the questions you ask and the way you ask them have a big impact on how useful and reliable the resulting data is.

You can also start from scratch, writing each question yourself, or use one of the time-saving tools available below. Once you have a bank of surveys, you can also re-use those to create new ones.

• Import questions - with your pre-prepared survey in a text file, SurveyMonkey will import everything for you. There will be some tidying up to do to ensure everything is set up correctly when using this option.
• Start from a template - there is a template for the vast majority of survey types you may be looking for. Whilst many of the templates come with a cost (particularly for those on the free version), the benefits will probably make that worthwhile if the alternative is not available, or would need to be written without experience.
  
• Build it for me - this clever wizard will prompt you for information that will result in the best questions and survey type from the SurveyMonkey library. With very little tweaking, you could have a survey ready in minutes!
• Answer Genius - This clever tool provides all the often-used response lists at your fingertips. It ensures you are using non-biased response lists with a wealth of experience behind their design.

2. Design your survey – considerations

SurveyMonkey makes it very easy for you to build a survey – often within a few clicks.
However, there are some things you must review in order to ensure you get good quality data and provide a good respondent experience.

Question types

There are many question types available  in SurveyMonkey. You can browse through the options to choose the one that best suits your needs.
Once you’ve drafted your set of questions, use this handy list to check you’ve set everything up correctly:

• Single or multicode? - Do you want respondents to give only one answer, or can they choose multiple answers? For multiple answers, choose ‘checkboxes’ and for single responses choose ‘multiple choice’ – sounds counterintuitive, but it’s right!
• Grid or separate questions? - If you want to ask people’s opinion on various aspects of your product or service, consider a grid question that displays all aspects within one question, making it easier and quicker for the respondent to give their answers. These are called ‘matrix / rating scales’ within SurveyMonkey
• What kind of scale? – you will find options for numbered scales such as 0-7 or 0-10, or worded scales such as ‘Very satisfied, Somewhat satisfied, Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, Somewhat dissatisfied, Very dissatisfied’. There is no right or wrong choice here, just what feels right within the flow of the questionnaire.
• Other specify – if there is a long list of possibilities for an answer, you may wish to pre-code the most common options but allow people to write in other answers, for example when asking their favourite brand of fizzy drink. You can select this within the tool using ‘Add an "Other" Answer Option for Comments’.
• Don’t know / not applicable - remember to add a ‘Don’t know’ or ‘none of the above’ where appropriate – usually SurveyMonkey does this by default, but you need to check.

Structure & Logic

The way your survey looks and flows is both important for the respondent experience and for your professional reputation – so definitely check your logic, layout and survey view before you launch.

• Routing logic – this is only available in the paid plan, but really important to the respondent experience – it ensures that you don’t ask them irrelevant questions.Click on the ‘logic’ button for each question to ensure you only ask the right people (e.g. why they gave a score of poor should only be asked of those giving that answer, not everyone)
• Layout – Do you want to show the questions page-by-page or all the questions in one long stream?Page-by-page will take longer and more clicks, but ensures the respondent doesn’t race ahead to see what’s coming next, which you may not want.

3. Review your survey build

Once you have created your survey with some questions using one of the methods above, and borne in mind the considerations too, you’ll want to review it in terms of visual appeal, and to ensure it makes sense.

Visual

This does not just referr to visual appeal, but whether questions are too long to read on one screen or whether code lists cannot all be seen together (meaning those on the second page will be much less likely to be used). You can also add your logo and corporate colours with the paid plan - a professional image will help with the response rate. Check the experience on different devices – will the question be understood and read as easily across mobile, tablet and laptop?

Sense-check

Does the logic of your survey make sense?Are you providing all the answer options that people may have? Review the survey to make sure it reads well and doesn’t use complex language that may be misunderstood or not understood at all.

4. Preview & Score

SurveyMonkey provides a great ‘genius’ tool that uses AI and a bank of existing surveys to check the quality of your survey, including estimated response rate and length of interview. You should keep the length as short as possible to ensure the highest response rate. If the estimated time is longer than ten minutes, review your questions and consider removing some that aren’t directly answering your business objectives.

5. Select your survey respondents

You may have your own lists of respondents, or social platforms where you will share the survey link. With SurveyMonkey, you can even embed the survey into a mobile app or into Messenger.

Alternatively, you can use SurveyMonkey’s panel of respondents. By selecting the sample size, demographic profile and market, the tool will give you a price for fielding your survey for you.

6. Set up the survey access

SurveyMonkey allows you to set up what they call ‘collectors’ which are different ways of sharing the link to your survey to your own respondent sources, or those offered by SurveyMonkey themselves. With the free plan you can have up to three ‘collectors’. The options are shown below.

7. Before you click launch…!

Once you have your collectors in place, you can send them out via email, post the link to your social channels, add them to your website, or launch your paid-respondent survey. But before you do, check this final list of items to ensure your survey gives the best experience and generates the highest quality data (but note, not all will be available in the free plan):

• Custom thank you: write a message that respondents will see when they complete the survey.
• Survey end page: decide what web page will display when the respondent has finished their survey, such as your website homepage or blog.
• Quality controls: disable multiple responses from the same device to ensure a person can only complete the survey once, ensure there are certain ‘Required questions’ before a survey can be treated as complete, and decide if you want to allow respondents to go back in the survey to amend previous answers or not.
• Custom URL: with the paid plan you can use an alternative link that doesn’t include ‘survey monkey’, making it more professional and personalised to your business.

8. Analyse & present your results

Congratulations – you have now successfully launched and collected responses to your survey! Now comes the next challenge: how to process the answers into a format for analysis and interpret and present the results.

Your data will appear in three types:

• Closed ended questions – these are instantly available as charts in SurveyMonkey, and in many cases you can also export those charts for inserting into PowerPoint presentations or even as an online dashboard you can share.
• Other specify questions – if you included an ‘other specify’ to some of your answer lists, you’ll want to check what people said.If the number selecting ‘other’ for any question is 10% or more you’ll want to break that down into more separate codes.
• Open ended questions – completely verbatim text-based answers give you a depth of response, but in order to report on them beyond providing interesting quotes, these answers will need to be coded.

Our article How to analyse data from SurveyMonkey provides all the detail on the analysis phase of your SurveyMonkey project, including the options for using coding within the tool, or when to use a dedicated tool such as codeit for more flexibility.

Overall, SurveyMonkey is extremely easy to use and is an ideal option for those businesses who want to understand their customers but don’t (yet) have budget for using a market research agency. Its intuitive nature and huge library built by experts mean that you don’t have to sacrifice data quality.

codeit works perfectly with SurveyMonkey to ensure your coding can be done fast and at the depth required. If you’d like to give codeit a go, you can take up our 30 day free trial to help you start coding and analysing your open-ended question data today.