What is CiviSurvey?

CiviCampaign has a feature that enables offline surveys by providing a standardised way to record survey responses and to then generate reports from the survey data. Survey responses are captured in an activity record (in an activity of the type Survey) for each individual.

Note that the Survey feature is used to record responses from your existing contacts. If you want to gather responses from individuals who may not exist in your database, you should use CiviCampaign's Petition feature; see the Petition section for more information.

For Drupal sites only, CiviCampaign interacts with the Drupal module CiviEngage to automatically provide additional options for your surveys; see the section Civic Engagement for more information.

Scenario: Public housing survey

Toft Organisation For Tenants (TOFT) focuses on protecting tenants' rights and lobbying for affordable housing. The organisation wanted to gather information about the housing conditions in one particular neighborhood to gain a better understanding of the scale of the issues and which of them were most pressing for this community. They decided that one strategy would be to undertake a survey to capture basic information about housing conditions and complaints about landlords. A focus group met to determine what questions and who should be asked.

A TOFT staff member then created a new survey in CiviCRM and built the list of respondents from the existing contacts. She generated and printed a walk list report, which was given to the volunteers who would carry out the survey.

Over the period of a week, a team of volunteers visited selected public housing buildings to interview the respondents and record their responses on the walk list. At the end of each day, the volunteers entered the responses of each individual into the CiviCRM database; some were able to do this from their home computers, while others returned to TOFT's office and used computers there.

At the conclusion of the survey, the programme leader used CiviCRM to search activities for the group of individuals who were surveyed, and generated reports to analyse the responses and inform the next strategy for their campaign. The results of the survey were also used to frame their messages and communications about the issues that were affecting the neighborhood.