Surveys are completely free with no limit on questions, responses or number of surveys you can create. You can survey an existing community on JISCMail (if you are the group owner) or create your own surveys group. We have 8 different question types to enable quick survey creation. We pride our service on being spam and virus free and secure with the use of SSL.

• The survey tool enables you to create a survey, post it to a JISCMail group and download the results in a variety of formats.
• Save your results to the files area of your JISCMail group.
• Email your results to your registered email address or your JISCMail group.

Access the surveys tool via list management or on the homepage of your group (https://www.JISCMail.ac.uk/yourgroupname).

Creating a Survey

Go to the surveys tool via list management or on the homepage of your group (https://www.JISCMail.ac.uk/yourgroupname). Click on 'Survey Management' if you are not presented with the survey management page.

Click on 'New' if you want to create a survey from scratch. You must type a name for your new survey. Introductory text is optional and the message box is pre filled out with standard text which you can change if you like.

To create a question, click on 'Add'. Type a question which is no more than 200 characters and choose a question type. The question types available are:

• Multiple choice radio
• Multiple choice list
• Multiple choice drop down list
• Tick all choices that apply
• Scale with five labelled degrees
• Scale of 1 - x
• Single line text field
• Multi-line text field

Once you have selected the question type via the radio button, fill out the choices (if appropriate) on the right hand side. The explanatory text is optional and once you have finished adding the question, click 'Save Question'.

You can continue adding as many questions as you like. Once you have finished entering your questions, click on the 'Back to Survey Management' button. When you are ready to send out your survey, enter a date to which the survey should conclude and click on the 'Activate' button.

Create a survey from a template or previous survey

If you have an existing survey you would like to base your new survey on, select it from the drop down and click 'Modify'. You can modify or delete existing questions and add new questions.

Active Surveys

When a list owner creates a survey and makes it active, they must specify an end date. This is the last date the survey will be available for completion, after which time the survey will be automatically concluded.

If the list owner does not wish the subscribers to view the results, select a survey from the 'Survey' drop down box and untick the 'Subscribers can view results' tick box and then conclude when they are ready to end the survey.

Surveys appearing in the drop-down list are those that you haven't yet completed. The date in brackets after the survey name is the end date and can be changed by the list owner. To complete a survey click on the 'Fill-out Survey' button.

If there are any surveys that you have already completed, and are still active, they will be listed along with the survey conclusion date.

Concluded Surveys

This section contains surveys that have been concluded and where the results are available for viewing. It is the list owner's discretion whether the results of a survey are viewable or not. To change between whether subscribers can view the results or not, select the survey from the 'survey' drop down list and click on 'Toggle Viewable'

When you click on View Results you will be presented with a page containing the results of the survey. Near the top left of the page you can see the percentage of subscribers who responded. In the main body of the page each question will be listed along with either a bar graph (where possible) or a list of the responses given.

Filling out a survey

Simply click on the link you have received, log into JISCMail (if you are not already logged in) and fill out the questions. Click on 'Submit Answers'. If you do not have a JISCMail password, you can register one here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?GETPW1=LMGT1

Viewing the results online and Reading Graphs

In the concluded surveys box of survey management, select a survey from the drop down list and click on 'View Results'.

Graphs are shown with the options for the current question on the left (y) axis and the number of votes along the bottom (x) axis.

On, or by, each bar is a percentage which indicates the percentage of the total number of responses that chose that option.

Downloading results

The surveys tool allows you to download the survey results in a CSV (tab separated file, spreadsheet format), PDF and XML.

In the concluded surveys box of survey management, select a survey from the drop down list and click on 'View Results'. Please note only concluded surveys are available. Here you will be able to select which format you wish to download the results in.

Email results

You can email the results of your survey to yourself or the list in either HTML format or adding the results as a PDF attachment.

In the concluded surveys box of survey management, select a survey from the drop down list and then select what format you should send the survey in and who to send it to. Click the 'Email Results' button.

Save your results to your group files area

You can save the results to your groups file area to store, subscribers to access or to provide a link to.

In the concluded surveys box of survey management, select a survey from the drop down list and click on 'View Results'. Please note only concluded surveys are available. Here you will be able to click on either 'Save tab-separated file to files area' or 'Save PDF file to files area'.

If you wish to provide your subscribers with a link to the survey in the files area use the format of https://www.JISCMail.ac.uk/files/groupname/filename. If your group is publically viewable then people who are not subscribed to the list will also be able to view your survey in the files area.

Privacy

All information submitted to a survey will be treated as confidential and held in a secure database by JISCMail. List owners cannot see the email addresses or names of individual respondents. However, they may ask survey questions which could be used to identify you. JISCMail will not otherwise make individual details available unless your permission has been obtained.