Leading Practices & FAQs

To require or not to require? Is my survey too long? Is my survey collecting good data? Our collection of leading practices guides call on the principles of good survey design to answer these tough questions. You can also get answers to frequently-asked questions and browse our best survey-saving tips here!

Articles

Leading Practices: Asking Good Questions
In this tutorial, we will cover some leading practice considerations for constructing survey questions. Following these tips will help you to collect meaningful, actionable data.
Leading Practices: Textbox Vs. Essay Which Question Type Should I Use?
Generally speaking, we recommend using textbox questions to collect a single word or short sentence response. Use essay questions to collect a paragraph or two of text.
Leading Practices: Requiring Questions
Below we'll discuss some leading practice tips for requiring survey questions. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Leading Practices: How to Build Accessible Surveys
Accessible surveys are designed to be accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability. There are two requirements for a survey to be accessible.
Leading Practices: Considerations Before Using Piping & Repeating
To pipe, or not to pipe, that is the question. While piping comes in handy during the build phase of your survey; it's not always the best setup when it comes to your data. There's almost always an alternative to using piping in your surv...
Leading Practices: Avoiding Survey Fatigue
Survey fatigue is a cultural phenomenon. You're probably familiar with this ironic headline: "Survey says Americans getting tired of surveys." As a tool that has made surveys so very easy to build, we accept some of the responsibil...
Leading Practices: Understanding and Reducing Bias in Your Surveys
Sampling Bias - Who You Survey Sampling Bias: When some members of your survey population are less likely to be invited to be surveyed than others. If you are looking to draw conclusions about a certain group, you'll need to ensure that e...
Leading Practices: Pre-Launch Checklist
Are you ready to launch your survey and start collecting responses? Excellent! We have prepared a checklist to help you make sure that you have crossed your t's and dotted your i's (both literally and figuratively) before you get your survey...
Email Deliverability Leading Practices: Making Sure Your Email Gets Where It's Going
The ability to distribute surveys via email campaigns within SurveyGizmo is one of our most popular features. In order for this powerful feature to continue to meet your needs we continually work...
Leading Practices: How To Improve Your Survey Email Invitations and Deliverability Rate
Below, you will find some helpful tips on improving your email invitations and the deliverability rate from a blog post by our very own Sandy McKee. Additionally, check out our Email Deliverability article . We would like to share these email b...
Leading Practices: Recommended Image / Photo Sizes for Use in SurveyGizmo
Depending on where you plan to use your image files we recommend different sizes: Image Select - we recommend image files of no larger than 200 x 200px. Header Images - we recommend images files up to 750px wide and 200px tall. Banner Header...
Leading Practices: Using SurveyGizmo for Student Research
Many students use SurveyGizmo to conduct research for their theses, dissertations or other graduate work. Students are certainly permitted to conduct research via the SurveyGizmo platform, provide...
Survey Building FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
SurveyGizmo's Build tab offers endless options for both creating and customizing your survey questions. Explore this FAQ for answers to commonly asked questions surrounding the Build tab.
Survey Logic FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
SurveyGizmo logic features allow you to customize your survey for each respondent by dynamically showing survey content based on things like answers to previous questions within the survey, email campaign contact information, or URL variables. &nb...
Piping/Repeating FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
Piping allows you to use information collected in your survey at a later point in that survey. Piping lets you efficiently tailor the survey experience to the specific respondent taking the survey.
Style FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
Our styling options are pretty powerful and, fortunately, pretty easy to use. From time to time questions and issues arise. Get answers to all your styling questions and issues in this list of FAQ
Share & Collect - FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
SurveyGizmo offers a number of options for sharing your surveys with your audience. Share a generic link, email a list of respondents, or embed your survey on your website.
Email Campaign FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
Email Campaigns are one of our most popular features. It is also one of our most complex features. Below are some of the most frequently asked Email Campaigns questions.   Just getting started with email campaigns? Check out our Email Campaig...
Survey Taking FAQs and Troubleshooting Tips
Survey taking, that is, the experience of responding to SurveyGizmo surveys is generally a pretty straightforward process. From time to time questions and issues arise. Get answers to all your survey-taking questions and issues in this FAQ.  ...
Retiring TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 SSL protocols
SurveyGizmo has scheduled a routine change to our services, and there is a change it could affect survey takers. To keep data safe while in transit, SurveyGizmo utilizes the industry-standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocols. I...
Individual Responses FAQs and Troubleshooting
Find answers to common questions and explore troubleshooting tips concerning your survey's Individual Responses tab.
Standard Report FAQs and Troubleshooting
Explore common questions and troubleshooting tips concerning SurveyGizmo's Standard Report.
Reports and Exports FAQs and Troubleshooting
Common questions and troubleshooting tips for SurveyGizmo's various report/export types, including: Crosstab Comparison Report TURF Report Profile Report Fall-Off Statistics CSV/Excel Export SPSS Export Bulk PDF Exp...
Billing FAQs
The Billing section of SurveyGizmo is accessible to Account Administrator users. How often will I get billed? SurveyGizmo offers Annual Billing.
Account and Login FAQs
Get answers to all your account and login questions and issues in this list of FAQs. Find information about trial accounts, the free plan, password resets, and other common account related questions.
HIPAA Compliance
There are three requirements to be HIPAA compliant while using SurveyGizmo: a signed BAA, Project Data Encryption, and secure SSL links.
System Requirements for Using SurveyGizmo
Using an outdated browser, specifically a browser that does not support TLS (Transport Socket Layer) 1.2, exposes you to security flaws that put you, your data, and our system at risk.
SurveyGizmo Application Status Page
SurveyGizmo maintains a page that will alert you to any non-operational parts of the application as well as any downgraded performance we are experiencing. Visit http://surveygizmo.statuspage.io/.
Great Survey Design Leading Practices
An interactive course from the makers of SurveyGizmo. Learn how to master the six steps of the Great Survey Design Cycle: design and build surveys that address your business' or organization's needs, then collect and report on response data ...
Whitelisting SurveyGizmo IP Addresses and Domains
Sometimes you may run into deliverability issues and may need to whitelist SurveyGizmo domains or IP addresses to help resolve this issue.
How to Encode an Excel File to UTF-8 or UTF-16
Encoding your Excel files into a UTF format (UTF-8 or UTF-16) can help to ensure anything you upload into SurveyGizmo can be read and displayed properly.
Private/Incognito or Safe Browsing
If you are experiencing weird behavior when editing a survey (some buttons not responding), one quick troubleshooting step you can try is running in Private/Incognito/Safe mode which will disable the use of browser plug-ins/extensions.
Privacy Shield FAQs
What is EU - US Privacy Shield?On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice issued a judgement declaring as invalid the European Commission’s Decision 2000/520/EC of 26 July 2000 on the ade...
SurveyGizmo's Accessibility Compliance
This document has details about SurveyGizmo's accessibility compliance as well as a link to our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).
Low Vision Mode
Part of SurveyGizmo's updates to make survey taking accessible to all respondents, Low Vision Mode allows survey respondents to increase contrast ratios, font sizes, and font weight.