In light of the recent news and uproar surrounding Instagram's updated terms of service describing their ability to sell photographs that are stored by users on their website, I thought it would be prudent and timely to remind you, our SurveyGold customers, of our position regarding the surveys and survey data that you collect, manage and track through the SurveyGold application and the surveygold.com, surveygoldplus.com and surveygoldcloud.com websites.

• Your online surveys and your online survey response data are processed by our websites and reside on our websites. However, your online surveys and your online survey responses belong to you. They do not belong to us. We are stewards of your data and nothing more. This means that the entire SurveyGold solution exists to serve your needs and not to serve our needs.
• We do not use your data for our business purposes. We proactively protect your survey and online survey response data via encryption and other measures. We do not scour your data looking for self-serving bits of information. We do not give anyone access to your data, unless required by law...which has never happened since opening our doors in 1999.
• We do not perform any other business activity with your online survey responses data other than making it available to you. We will never sell or provide your data to anyone or any institution without your knowledge and consent or, again, as required by law. We say so formally in our published privacy policy.
• As a reflection of our commitment to protecting the data you entrust to our SurveyGold survey solution, all of our websites are routinely scanned by an independent compliance organization and are attested to be compliant with PCI Security Standards.

My intention in making this statement is not to stir up a hornet's nest of inquiry and suspicion. Rather, my intention it so assure our SurveyGold users around the world that we consider it a sacred trust to process and store your online surveys and survey response data. We will never, ever, ever violate that trust. This is the very foundation of our SurveyGold brand promise to you.

You've created an online survey using your SurveyGold application and for the longest time you have been the one responsible for collecting responses, performing analysis and reporting on results. The day has come when your job responsibilities have changed and you need to pass along responsibility of collecting responses of this online survey to another SurveyGold user in your organization so that they can take over your survey management responsibilities. 

If this describes your situation, the following guidance describes how to accomplish this. For the sake of this discussion, there are two people involved in this process and there are step-by-step instructions to follow for each person:

• Original Survey Owner
  You, the person who currently has the survey in your SurveyGold application and wants to permanently transfer ownership to another person while retaining your SurveyGold application
• New Survey Owner
  The other person who wants to get your survey and responses permanently transferred to their SurveyGold application and who wants to collect online survey responses for this survey into their SurveyGold application from now on

1) Remove your existing online survey from circulation

This prevents anyone else from being able to respond to the online survey while you are in the process of transferring the survey.

If the online survey is currently published on the SurveyGold website (because you used your SurveyGold application to publish your online survey):

1. Launch your SurveyGold application, if it is not open
2. Select the Setup Survey tab
3. Right-click on the survey and select Remove Web Form from SurveyGold Website from the popup menu

In contrast, if the online survey is on your organization's website, remove the online survey from your website (or work with a webmaster to do so).

2) Collect the remaining online survey responses for your survey into your SurveyGold application

This ensures that you have collected all responses for your online survey form prior to transferring ownership of the survey.

1. Select the Dashboard tab
2. Perform the Update Activity action

3) Export your survey and responses from your SurveyGold application into a survey definition file

This makes it possible to transfer your survey and response data to another SurveyGold user.

1. Select the Setup Survey tab
2. Right-click on the survey and select Lock from the popup menu (do not specify a password)
3. Right-click on the survey again and select Export from the popup menu
4. Save the survey definition file to a folder accessible by the new survey owner (e.g., network folder, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, USB flash drive)

4) Remove your survey from your SurveyGold application

This permanently removes the survey and responses from your SurveyGold.

1. Select the Setup Survey tab
2. Right-click on your survey and select Delete from the popup menu

1) Import the survey definition file into your SurveyGold application

This causes the survey and responses to be imported into your SurveyGold application.

1. Launch your SurveyGold application, if it is not open
2. Select the Setup Survey tab
3. Select the folder that you want to contain your survey (normally this is My Surveys)
4. Select Import from the Folder group in the button bar
5. Select the network shared folder where the Original Survey Owner moved the survey definition file in step 3 above
6. Select the survey from the list of surveys
7. Select the Import Responses option and select OK

2) Distribute the survey as an online survey form via your SurveyGold application

This causes a new online survey to be created by and distributed by your SurveyGold application. Doing this ensures that any new responses submitted via the online survey form are collected into your SurveyGold application.

1. Select the Setup Survey tab
2. Select the newly imported survey
3. Select Save as Web Form from Survey group in the button bar
4. Complete the specific steps to create the online survey form and distribute to your liking (most people publish the online survey form to the SurveyGold website)

Here are a few tips for working with the survey results collected in your SurveyGold application.

One of the most common inquiries I receive pertains to how to manage long-running surveys. Specifically, many SurveyGold users are conducted assessments surveys over time so that can measure, for example, last year's results with this year's results.

The solution that many SurveyGold users employ is to use the Copy Survey command in the Setup Survey tab to create a copy of last year's survey and just change the name slightly so that it becomes  this year's survey. However, my recommendation is that you do not create a new survey, but continue to collect responses using the existing survey. Then you can use the date range filter feature in the View Results tab to view only the respondents from a particular time period such as last year. The benefit of this is that you can easily create a filter for last year and another filter for this year and then compare the two sets of respondents as multiple series in a single graph. This is not possible if you create two separate surveys and is only possible by using the date range filter from the entire set of long-running survey results.

Check out our SurveyGold Tutorial channel for a brief show-and-tell video explaining how the filter feature works.

If you are unable to access YouTube, the tutorial is also available on our website.

It is often necessary to write a lengthy question in order to convey the intent of the question to the respondent. Later after the results have been collected and you begin to view results in graphs and/or reports, the lengthy question text results in visual clutter in those graphs and reports.

The solution to this problem is not go back and change the question text from verbose to succinct. Rather, in this case I recommend that you use the chart title feature of SurveyGold that provides the ability for you to specify a more succinct chart title without changing the question text itself.

You can change the chart title associated with a question in one of two ways:

• In Setup Survey, via the Chart Title tab in the question properties sheet
• In View Results, by right-clicking while viewing a particular question and selecting Change Chart Title from the popup menu

Keep in mind that any SurveyGold survey question that has choices (in other words, it is not a fill-in-the-blank question) appears as a graph in the View Results and Analyze Results graphs and reports. So, it helps to keep question response choices as terse as possible so as to avoid crowded or truncated graph labels and legends.

Even if you have a situation where you cannot avoid creating lengthy question response choices, it is possible for you to influence the way that the choices appear in a graph:

1. From the SurveyGold application main menu select the View Results tab.
2. Select your survey from the list.
   
3. Select a question that you know has lengthy question response choices and select View Results.
   
4. When the pie graph appears, right-click and select Change Legend Font Size.
   
5. When the dialog appears, change the legend font size from "Auto" to "8" and select OK.
   
6. When the pie graph appears, right-click and select Change Label Font Size.
   
7. When the dialog appears, change the legend font size from "Auto" to "8" and select OK.

This makes the legend and label fonts as small as possible which makes the text that appears in the graph which makes the legends and text as small as possible thereby avoiding truncation of the response text or legend text in the graph.

When making plans to create and distribute your survey, here are five things to keep in mind.

Let's face it, if a respondent can't figure out in a few sentences what the objective of your survey is and how they can contribute, then they are less likely to respond. Being forthright in your cover letter/email and initial instructions as to why you are conducting the survey and how the results will be used is important.

It's subtle, but an important point that can easily be overlooked is how you appeal to the respondent to participate in your survey. The cover letter or email that accompanies with your survey questionnaire can have a big influence in response rates. Specifically, research indicates that it is a good idea to include a sentence or two specifically asking for the respondent's participation citing the importance of their helpful input in achieving the objectives of the survey (i.e., improving a product, process, work environment, etc.). Doing so appeals to the respondent's sense of being a helpful contributor when called upon to participate.

For surveys that are not compulsory for the respondent to complete, it's common sense that providing incentives generally results in better response rates. As a rule of thumb, research indicates that the larger the incentive, the larger the response rate. Consider offering a raffle drawing prize or perhaps an incentive for the first 50 respondents. Managing your incentives in this way also means that you don't have to spend a fortune on incentive rewards. Also, it is important for the respondent to actually believe that your survey is credible and that the incentive reward will actually be given. Providing instructions to the respondent that include an email address with your organization's email domain name (i.e., yourcompany.com) or some other means of contact (a phone number or mailing address) can often provide the necessary impression that your survey is legitimate.

Surveys that take less time to complete typically result in better response rates. Review the objectives of your survey and keep only those questions that are essential in achieving your objective. Including a statement in your cover letter or initial instructions that the survey should take, for example, no more than five minutes to complete can positively influence a respondent to participate. You will want to, of course, have several people take the survey before widely distributing it to make sure that your claim of five minutes is accurate.

It's a good idea to distribute your survey to a small set of people (preferably accessible colleagues or constituents) who actually complete the survey before you send it out to a broader audience. You can then follow-up with these respondents via a phone call or email asking them if their experience with the survey was difficult or confusing in any area. This provides an opportunity to collect feedback from actual respondents and make fine tuning adjustments to any confusing or hard parts in the survey. Sometimes rewriting a question or adding specific choices makes all the difference. This vetting process produces dividends because you can have a better confidence in your survey when you send it out to a broader set of respondents.

Sometimes it is helpful to pre-populate an online survey response or respondent data with a pre-specified value. For example, if your organization provides customer services and you want to follow up after completing a customer service incident, it would be helpful to send an online survey invitation to the customer where the service incident number (sometimes referred to as a ticket number) is already entered into the appropriate field when for the customer opens the online survey form.

The following tip describes how to accomplish this using a SurveyGold online survey form. 

The ability to pre-specify online survey form field values is provided through an advanced feature that uses a web address convention called a query string. A query string is the part of a web address (URL) that provides data to be passed to the online survey form.

After you have saved your online survey form and placed it on the surveygoldcloud.com website or your website, you append one or more query string names and associated values to the web address (URL) of your online survey form when directing that online survey form to a particular respondent. In practice, the web address (URL) and the specific query string values are generated by an application such as a customer support or help desk management system that tracks your support incidents.

Here is a list of the query string names for the respondent data fields:

In addition to respondent data fields, any fill-in-the-blank question that allows only one response can also have its value assigned via a query string variable. The name of the query string variable is available for copy/paste via the second tab of the question properties sheet. The query string name differs depending upon whether you are using the email or record processing option.

Here is an example that explains how this feature is used. Let's assume you have a customer support tracking application that creates a ticket number for each support incident for a given customer. Let's also assume that you have created a support quality of service online survey form using SurveyGold that uses the first author-defined field to capture the customer support ticket number generated by your customer support tracking application.

You have placed the online survey form on the surveygoldcloud.com website or your website and you want to use your customer support tracking application solution to generate an email to send to the customer at the conclusion of the support incident. You want the email to contain a web address link (URL) to the online survey form, and you want the link to pass the customer support incident number into the online survey form so that it is automatically entered in the first author-defined field. This is how you would accomplish this using SurveyGold:

STEP 1
Use SurveyGold to setup your customer satisfaction questions. Open the survey properties sheet by selecting your survey in the Setup Survey tab and selecting the Properties button in the Groups button bar.

STEP 2
Select the Collect This Respondent Data tab in the survey properties sheet.

STEP 3
Select the checkbox next to the "Custom 1" field and enter the word "Ticket Number" in the prompt just to the right of the "Custom 1" field.

STEP 4
Select OK to save your changes to the survey and to close the survey properties sheet.

STEP 5
Save your survey as an online survey form and publish it to the SurveyGold website or your website.

STEP 6
Have your customer support tracking application create an email that contains a web address (URL) to the online survey form on your site and have it append the support ticket query string and the support ticket value to the the web address (URL).

For example, if your online survey form is located at http://www.mysite.com/supportsurvey.htm and the support ticket number for this support incident is 12345-6, then the web address (URL) generated by your customer support tracking application would be:

http://www.mysite.com/supportsurvey.htm?R1=12345-6

STEP 7
When your respondent selects the link in the email, the online survey form opens and the value 12345-6 appears in the Ticket Number field. Furthermore, the value 12345-6 in the Ticket Number field cannot be altered by the respondent in the online survey form. When the respondent submits their completed form, the value 12345-6 in the Ticket Number field is included in the submitted set of responses.

To append multiple query string values, separate them using the ampersand symbol. For example, to pre-populate the responses for the Ticket Number, Customer First Name, Customer Last Name and the response to the first question which contains the service technician's name, your web address (URL) would look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/supportsurvey.htm?R1=1234566&RF=Jane&RL=Smith&Q1_1=John Doe

Check out this brief show-and-tell video explaining how this feature works.

All of your SurveyGold data (including your surveys, questions, respondents, responses) is stored in a single database file that is typically located on your computer's internal hard drive. The reality of today's computing environment is that hard drives fail, computers get replaced, and sometimes files even get unintentionally erased.

To prevent you from having a bad day when the inevitable occurs, your SurveyGold application periodically invites you to create a backup of your data as you exit SurveyGold. Every time you accept the invitation to backup your data, SurveyGold creates a unique copy of your database file as it exists at the time the backup is made.

When you accept SurveyGold's invitation to create a backup, the only thing that you need to tell SurveyGold is the name of the folder where you want SurveyGold to make the backup copy of its database file.

It is a very good idea to make the backup copy on to a different media (i.e., USB flash drive, network folder, external hard drive) rather than backing up your data to a folder on the same drive where the SurveyGold database exists. The motivation for doing this is to avoid losing both your SurveyGold database file and your backup database file in the event that your computer's hard drive fails.

When SurveyGold creates a backup of your data, it does so by copying its own database file (a file named survey.db) to a folder location that you specify. It names the backup file as follows:

 survey_backup_<clientID>_<datetime>.db

Note that <clientID> is replaced with the client ID for your SurveyGold application and <datetime> is replaced with the backup date and time (right down to the hour, minute and second). The client ID is a number that uniquely identifies your SurveyGold application. For example, if you made a backup of your database file on December 5, 2012 at 10:51AM, and your client ID was 123123123123123123123123 the resulting backup file would be named:

 survey_backup_123123123123123123123123 _20121205105100.db

In a typical scenario, you restore your database because you moving your SurveyGold application from an old computer to a new computer or because you inadvertently deleted some data that you want to recover.

Note: In this case, you would download and install the SurveyGold application directly from our website. You do not need to register the SurveyGold application because the database you are about to restore already contains this data.

Step 1
Close SurveyGold if it is running.

Step 2
Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the network folder where your survey_backup_<clientID>_<datetime>.db file is located and copy it to the folder where SurveyGold looks for its database files:

The SurveyGold Database folder is located at:

    C:\Users
          \YOUR_WINDOWS_LOGIN_NAME_GOES_HERE
            \AppData
              \Local
                \SurveyGold
                  \Database

Note: If you cannot see the specified folder via Windows Explorer, it is most likely hidden. Here is how to resolve this:

  1. Open Windows Explorer holding down the Windows key and pressing E.
  2. Select the Tools menu.
  3. Select the Folder Options menu item.
  4. Select the View folder.
  5. Check the option entitled "Show hidden files and folders".
  6. Select OK.

You should now be able to see this folder. If it does not appear, please consult with your IT staff as to where this folder is located in your particular environment.

Step 3
Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the SurveyGold Database folder (as specified in Step 2). Locate a file named survey.db and rename it to surveyold.db. Rename the survey_backup_<clientID>_<datetime>.db file to survey.db

Step 4
Launch SurveyGold and you will see your data as of the last time you backed up your data.

If you do not have a backup database file it is a worst-case scenario because there is no other way to recover your data. We do not keep a backup of your database file nor do we keep a backup of your web survey responses on our website. You have the only copy of your data. So, play it safe and always maintain a backup copy of your SurveyGold data.

You have distributed a paper-based form using SurveyGold and you have collected a large set of completed paper questionnaires. At first it might appear that the only way to get those responses entered into SurveyGold is to have one person sit down and manually enter the responses one-at-a-time into the SurveyGold application. While this is one way to do it, there is an easier way if you get other people involved.

The following tip describes an inexpensive and efficient way to allow others to assist you in doing data entry for large numbers of paper-based survey responses. The techniques described herein also work well for multiple phone interviewers conducting repeated over-the-phone surveys.

Distribute your online survey form to any number of people performing data entry for you. There are two options for distributing your online survey:

• Option A (Easiest) - Save your online survey form via SurveyGold Online Services
  Then email the link to your online survey form to your data entry colleagues. They can then proceed in using the form repeatedly without restriction.
  
  Note: Option A will not be viable if you already have an online survey form distributed via the SurveyGold Online Services that has the "Detect and prohibit multiple submissions from the same respondent." This is because an online survey form that has this feature enabled is suitable for the general population of respondents who only should complete the form once, as opposed to your data entry colleagues who need to be able to complete the form repeatedly.
  
  
• Option B - Save your online survey to a folder on your computer 
  The folder can be any network folder, shared virtual drive (e.g., Google Drive, iDrive, OneDrive) or a folder on an internal website.
  
  Then email the location of the file to your data entry colleagues. They can then proceed in using the form repeatedly without restriction.
  
  

Note: The data entry work can be done from anywhere, not just on the computer where SurveyGold is installed. For example, it can be accessed at your colleague's home, their office, a dorm room, a coffee shop, etc.)
​

Provide each data entry person with a portion of the stack of paper survey forms to enter. For each paper form, have them access the online survey form and perform the following actions:

• Transcribe the responses from a paper form into the online survey form and select the "Submit Your Responses" button. (Note: The submitted responses are recorded on SurveyGold.com for later downloading into your SurveyGold application.)
• Select the browser's Back button to redisplay the online survey form just submitted.
• The previous responses may still be in the form. Select the "Clear All Responses" button to clear the form of responses.

When you are ready to view the results in your SurveyGold application, simply perform the Update Activity action in the Home tab. This automatically downloads the submitted online survey responses from SurveyGold Online Services and imports them into your SurveyGold application whereby you can view and analyze the results.