Creating and Testing Surveys

Surveys in Handshake empowers your team to gather information from students and employers through multiple avenues, including embedding surveys in:

• automated emails (i.e. post-appointment emails)
• forms (i.e. career fair registration forms)
• custom emails via a call-to-action Button (in Targeted Emails) 

Topics: 

• Create a new survey
• Test a survey
• View responses

Create a new survey 

Click Surveys from the left navigation bar, then click the New Survey tab in the upper-right corner of the page.

On the page that loads, there are 4 tabs at the bottom of the page: Setup, Pages, Questions and Review. These represent the sections you’ll complete to create the survey, detailed below.

Note: At any point during creation, you can click the blue button Save Changes to save your progress and return to the survey draft at a later date or time. 

Setup

On the setup page, enter the survey setup details: 

• Title - enter the title, which will be displayed to survey recipients
• Description - provide a description as desired
• Required for Students? - check this box if this survey is required for students. If marked, this will display a message under the student's survey section in Handshake. Please refer to How to Take a Survey in Handshake for the student's perspective of this message.
  • Tip: don't check this box if this is a survey you plan to attach to a form or appointment
• Available to employers? - check this box if you'd like employers to find and take this survey
• Completion Label - if selected, the label will be applied to any users who complete this survey
  • Tip: if you plan to use a completion label, but the desired label has not been created, open your Institution Settings in a new tab or window (via right click, open in new tab/window), and create the label. When you come back to the survey creation, the new label should be listed in the dropdown.
  • For more details, refer to About Survey Completion Labels.

When you're ready to proceed, click the blue button Next in the bottom-middle of the screen.

Pages

In the Pages section, you can edit the page name and description, as well as create a multi-page survey.

To edit the existing single page, click Edit to the far-right of "Page 1", then fill in the desired information.

You can:

• edit Name and Description as desired
• designate a specific subset of students as the Audience (this setting eliminates the need for more complex skip logic!)
  • Note: dropdown menu items are based on courses mapped to course groups in your institution settings, and colleges created in your institution settings. If you aren't seeing a particular course group appear as expected, double-check that you have at least one course mapped to that group in your institution settings!
    • Students must have a corresponding course and/or college reflected on their profile to view the page.

Click the blue Save button to save page changes.

• Best Practice: Don’t paginate your survey if it’s going to be embedded in an email or a form. For example, a survey being used to gather pre-appointment information from students should be a single page survey, or a survey being included for employers on a fair registration form.

Use multiple pages if you’re going to use skip logic or if you’re creating a long survey. To add another page, click the blue button Add Page in the lower-left corner.

Once two or more pages are present, you can drag and drop the pages to change the display order and set up subsequent skip logic. Skip logic will redirect the survey recipient to another page once that page is completed. 

When you're satisfied with the pages, click the blue button Next at the bottom-middle of the page to proceed to Questions.

Questions

In the Questions section, click Add Question to set up the question:

• Question (text box): enter your question in the field provided
• Required? (checkbox): check the box if you require an answer 
• Question Type (dropdown): select this question's type from the list - Short Answer / Essay / Choose Many / Choose One / Scale

Question Types

Short Answer: provides a small box for the participant to type a short answer

Essay: provides a larger box for the participant to use to type a longer answer

Choose Many: a multiple choice question where the participant can check multiple answer options

Choose One: a multiple choice question where the participant has to select a single (radio button) answer option

• Note: if you select Choose Many or Choose One, you’ll:
  • need to add at least two answer options (called “Options”) for the participant to choose from.
  • be able to set up skip logic for the question. To the right of each option, click the dropdown menu to the right that reads Skip to, then select the page you'd like the responder to be directed to when choosing that answer. If you leave the Skip To box empty, the participant will automatically be taken to the next survey question.
    • Note:  If you use skip logic on a question that allows multiple answers, the participant will be taken to the closest page the survey directs to based on their selected answers.
    • For example, on a Page 1 skip logic question, if a participant chose one answer that would skip him to Page 2 and one answer that would skip him to Page 3, he would be taken to Page 2 upon submitting his answers.
    • In a different example, like a “choose all that apply question”, it will take the participant to the page from the FIRST option selected, based on the order of the answers selected, not on the order of the pages.

Scale: provides a customisable scale with options 1-10 that the responder can select from, the minimum and maximum may vary and be defined as you wish

Click the blue button Add Question for each additional question you’d like to add, and repeat the steps above, then click Save in the lower-right corner of the page when finished.

When you've finished setting up all desired pages and questions, click Next or the Review tab.

If everything looks correct, click Create in the lower-right corner of the page to add this survey to your survey library. Once it's created, the survey can be used in emails and forms.

Note: There isn't an option to add an attachment on a survey. However, you are able to add a link to the attachment in the survey question itself.

Test a survey

If you'd like to test out your newly created survey, you'll want to make sure you have a student account created.

Copy the survey link from the browser when viewing the survey overview page, then switch to your student user account, and paste in that survey link.

You'll be able to click through each page and test the questions and skip logic. When you reach the end of the survey, be sure not to "submit" your test response. If you submit the response, you'll no longer be able to edit the survey. 

View responses

To view responses to any survey, click Surveys on the left navigation bar, then click on the relevant survey to be taken to that survey’s overview page.

You can review responses on the overview page or click the Download Results button to receive a .csv file of all results. You can also send a follow-up email to survey recipients. 

Note: the recipients number will only increase if the survey is sent directly to students through the manage students tab. If they survey is sent automatically following an appointment, career fair, event, experience, etc. the recipient list will display zero.