Understanding Surveys

Applies to:Owner, Admin

Surveys let you ask your community a question and get a countable answer back. Where a broadcast pushes information out, a survey pulls opinion in — useful before a board vote, when weighing an assessment increase, or when you need to know whether anyone actually wants the pool hours extended.

Where to find it

Surveys live under Communications → Surveys in your main navigation.

Only Owners and Admins can create or view surveys. Board Members do not have access to the surveys area, even though they can see Broadcasts and Announcements. Residents never see the admin area, but they do receive survey invitations and can respond.

Decide the privacy mode first

Every survey is either Show who responded or Anonymous, and this is the single most important decision you’ll make. It is set when you create the survey, can be changed while the survey is still a draft or scheduled, and locks permanently once the survey goes live.

• Show who responded — each response stays tied to the contact who submitted it. You can read an individual person’s answers, see names beside free-text comments, and see exactly who hasn’t responded yet.
• Anonymous — identity is stripped at the moment of submission, not merely hidden from the screen. You get counts, percentages, and the text of every answer, but the link back to the person is destroyed and cannot be recovered by anyone, including support.

Anonymous is the honest choice when you’re asking something people may not answer candidly under their own name — satisfaction with the board, for instance. Choose it deliberately, because an anonymous survey cannot be un-anonymised later.

Caution

Anonymous mode also removes your ability to see who hasn’t responded by name. You’ll still get a count of outstanding invitations, so reminders continue to work, but you won’t be able to nudge specific people directly.

The life of a survey

A survey moves through a fixed sequence of states, shown as a badge wherever the survey appears:

• Draft — being built. Nothing has been sent. Only drafts can be deleted.
• Scheduled — finished and queued to send itself at a date and time you picked.
• Live — invitations have gone out and responses are coming in.
• Closed — no longer accepting responses. Results remain fully available.
• Archived — tidied out of the way once you’re done with it.

Once the first response arrives, the survey can no longer be edited at all. This is by design: people answered a particular set of questions under particular terms, and quietly revising those afterwards would misrepresent what they agreed to. Treat launch as the point of no return for wording, timing, and settings alike.

Where to go next

• Building your first one? See Creating a Survey.
• Ready to send it? See Launching and Closing a Survey.
• Responses coming in? See Viewing Survey Results.
• Want to publish the outcome? See Sharing Results Publicly.