Data integration a survey is an effective tool that allows you to fill your survey with information you already know about the respondent, in order to save them time, or answer hidden questions in your questionnaire in order to analyze data you have collected but your respondent doesn’t necessarily know, how much business they bring to you and much more.
This feature requires you to add questions into your survey and to answer instead of your respondents before publishing. You can choose to keep the questions and answers visible for your respondants or hide them.
Here are some basic guidelines to our Data integration feature
1. Add the questions to pre-fill
First of all, you have to add in your survey the questions to pre-fill
- To do so, get to the “edit” module,”create” tab
- Click on the questions to pre-fill to add them in your survey. You can pre-fill different types of questions : multiple choice, checkbox, scale, slider, numeric text, text, ranking, continuous sum, numerical and date
- If you don’t want your respondents’ to know about these pre-filled questions, check the option “hide” for each question.
2. Create/import your contacts :
- From the module “Contact Manager”, import your group of contacts thanks to a CSV file. You can also create a group using existing contacts.
3. Create your CSV file containing the responses to import
We advice you to re use the same CSV file used to create your contacts in order to add the information/data to import.
- The first column of the CSV file must contain the email address of all your respondents as they appear in your group of contacts
- Then, fill-in a information per column
- Do not forget to insert a header in your file in order to easily spot the information during the import
Here is how you need to display information in the CSV file to pre-fill the different type of questions:
- For multiple-choice questions, where the respondent is allowed to select only one answer choice, you must insert the text of the answer choice into the cell that corresponds to the person’s answer
4. Create your pre-filling :
- Go to the “Publish” module, click on “Data integration” => “Import responses from a CSV file“
- Then click on “Create a new data integration”
- You can rename it by clicking on the ‘A’ icon on the right side of the title
- Click on the modify icon (pencil)
- Here, you can add a group of contacts by clicking on “Add a group” (the one you downloaded previously) or add individual respondents by clicking on “Add respondents”
5. Import your pre-fill CSV file
- Click on “CSV Import”.
- Select the file and upload it.
- Match the emails in your group with those in your response list. This allows each response to be matched with the correct individual contact. When you are sure all emails are well matched, click “Save”.
- Now match the headers of your response file to the questions in your survey use the drop-down menu to select the corresponding question.
- Select a question and match all the choices for that question.
- For certain questions type, the responses are automatically inserted. In this case, you will see the sentence “The data integration for this type of question is automatic”
- Once you have finished matching up all the questions and their choices, click “Save”.
Tip : You will notice that even if you have made a spelling mistake in your CSV file, the software allows you to associate it correctly.
IMPORTANT: Your pre-fill CSV file must contain 500 contacts maximum. If you have more than 500 contacts in your file, you will have to divide it into groups of 500;
6. Send your questionnaire :
- Click on “Publish” then “mail”.
- Below the object of the email, click on “data integration” and click on the title of your pre-fill to select it.
- You can then personalize the content of your email and click on “Validate”
- When your email is ready click “Send” and click “Yes” to confirm.
TIP: Test the data integration feature with your own email address to check everything is running fine before sending your survey.
There are many ways pre-populating surveys can be useful. It isn’t just a way to speed up a survey. Pre-populating a survey is an effective tool to compliment your data collection and supplements of information can be exceptionally helpful in analysis to make real business decisions.