Fireside has a survey platform to publish surveys that capture valuable constituent information. Surveys can be used to collect the opinions of your constituents regarding specific issues and also allow you to increase your newsletter subscriber count.
Go to Website > Surveys. Click the blue “+” button on the top right hand corner of the page. Give the survey a name which will be the title of the new page on your website, and click "Create" to view a screen similar to the screen below.
Add questions to the survey
To add a new question to the survey click the blue 'insert field' button in the top-right corner. That gives you three options.
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Text block:
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This is for a chunk of text or images and is helpful for formatting the survey.
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Existing:
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Fireside comes with many questions that will feed into existing fields like first name, last name, home address, home phone, etc. If it's something you already have information about, it's an existing field
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New:
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When you want to make a brand new question that hasn't been asked before or used, choose this option.
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To note, for surveys, a new question is the same as adding in a new field. Fields are global in Fireside and show up on every single persons profile. When you create a new field in a survey, it is created for every single person in Fireside. Learn more about fields at link.
You can rearrange questions by clicking and dragging the six dots icon on the left hand side of each question. All changes are saved automatically.
Additional question options
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Determine if any of the fields should be required or hidden. Hidden fields can be used to automatically opt people in to your email newsletter upon survey submission, but a disclaimer should be added to the footer text section.
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Determine if a default value should be provided for any of the fields. Example: If you are creating an RSVP form, the default value may be "true" for whether they are RSVPing for the event.
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If you want any of your text-type fields to have multiple lines available for users (like a comment box), select the "Edit field" link and type a number for how many rows you want the text box to display on your site. All text fields have a 1000-character limit.
Survey Text
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Click the "Edit header text" link to open a text editor to edit the text located above the survey questions. Save when complete.
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Click the "Edit footer text" link to open a text editor to edit the text located above the below the submit button. Save when complete.
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Click the "Edit confirmation text" link to open a text editor to edit what appears after the survey is submitted. Save when complete.
Layout
This is rarely something that you'll change, but you can choose to have a two column layout with the questions on the left and the information box on the right. You can also add text boxes to add more language or space in between questions.
Send to...
If you click the Send to... button at the top you can choose to send form submissions to an email address in addition to having the results come back into Fireside onto a persons profile.
Publishing the Survey
To see what the survey will look like, you can click the 'preview' button at the top of the survey. That will take you to your website to see what the survey will look like. To publish the survey, go back to the Website > Surveys page, find the survey you created and then click the action button hovering over the survey and then select “Publish.” Once published the status will add in a green dot and say Published. Note, The survey must be published before using it on newsletters, websites, or forms letters.
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Example preview link: http://MEMBERNAME.house.gov/Forms/Form/?ID=1375&Preview=true
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Example link to distribute: http://MEMBERNAME.house.gov/Forms/Form/?ID=1375
Survey Responses
To see a quick overview of the survey results as the come in, go to the website > surveys page and click on the number for the responses. To see results to questions that have individual answers, like text fields, build an audience of the survey results and export the survey by choosing the fields used on the survey.
Things to note:
1. When you create unique fields and plan to reuse them, it is important to know that if someone who has already taken the survey then takes the new survey with the old field, it will update the information for the new survey and remove them from the old survey.
2. You can pull any fields (required and not required) into an audience, but if you change the name of the the field or the criteria in the fields for another survey, you will lose the results from the first survey.