Creating a Survey

Applies to:Owner, Admin

Creating a survey happens in two stages: you set up the basics, then you build the questions. Nothing is sent until you explicitly launch it, so you can take as long as you like over a draft.

Setting up the basics

From Communications → Surveys, choose New Survey. You’ll be asked for:

• Title — what residents see in their inbox and at the top of the survey.
• Description — optional, and worth writing. It appears both on the survey itself and in the invitation email, so it’s your chance to explain why you’re asking and what you’ll do with the answers.
• Response privacy — Show who responded or Anonymous. Read Understanding Surveys before choosing; this locks once the survey is live.
• Recipients — who gets invited. You can pick a saved audience or build a one-off filter, exactly as you would for a broadcast. See Targeting Your Audience.
• Closes at — the date and time responses stop being accepted. This is required, so every survey has a deadline.
• Send a final reminder before close — how many hours before closing to email everyone who hasn’t answered yet. Defaults to 24 hours.

Choose Create survey and you’ll land in the survey editor with an empty question list.

Building the questions

The editor has two tabs: Fields and Settings.

Fields is where you build the survey. Add questions one at a time, and drag to reorder them. Seven types are available:

Type	Best for
Short Answer	Names, single words, brief replies
Long Answer	Open comments and explanations
Select Single	Pick exactly one from a list
Select Multiple	Pick any number from a list
Rating Scale	Numeric scoring, with labels at each end
Date Field	Preferred dates, availability
Text Block	Not a question — a paragraph of explanation between sections

Each question has a Make this field required option. Text Block is the exception to everything here: it collects nothing, doesn’t appear in your results, and exists purely to give the reader context part-way through.

A note on question types and results: Select Single, Select Multiple, and Rating Scale produce clean, countable charts. Short Answer and Long Answer produce a list of individual comments you’ll need to read. Both are valuable, but a survey built entirely from Long Answer questions is a reading exercise, not a measurement — mix in some scaled questions if you want a number you can act on.

The Details panel beside the question list lets you adjust the title and description as you work. Changes there save automatically.

Reviewing the settings

The Settings tab holds everything you chose at creation — privacy mode, recipients, closing time, and the reminder interval — so you can revise any of it while the survey is still a draft.

This is also where you’ll find Delete survey, which is only available while the survey is a draft with no responses. Once a survey has been launched and answered, it can be closed and archived but never deleted.

What locks, and when

Two things lock the moment the survey goes live:

• Response privacy — you’ll see “Privacy mode is locked once a survey is live.”
• Recipients — you’ll see “Audience is locked once a survey is live.”

Then the first response lands, and the survey stops being editable altogether. On the question list you’ll see a banner reading “This form is locked — responses have been submitted, so fields can no longer be added, removed, or edited.”

That is intentional rather than restrictive. Every answer you hold was given against a specific set of questions and a specific deadline, and letting those change underneath the responses already collected would make the results dishonest.

It does mean the draft stage is the only place to get things right, and there is no preview or test send to lean on. Read the questions through carefully before you launch — after the first resident answers, the only remaining fix is to close the survey and start a new one.

Where to go next

• Ready to send? See Launching and Closing a Survey.