Survey

Hi all, not sure if this is something others may have experienced.

We have a Survey that we currently send out via email with an Excel file attached. The reason for that is several people from an organisation or department may need to provide a response.

Example:

Q1. Is about the revenue for the financial year

Q2. Is about their employer engagement

Q3. About their Educational process

and so on...as you can see, Q1 is likely to be answered by the CFO or someone in the finance department, Q2 by the Employer Partnership teams, Q3 by the education division etc. Which means although I send an email to John, he can send the file to Joanne, Joanne can send to Rebekah and Rebekah sends back to me or to John who can send to me. Many people involved.

As this survey is sent across multiple vendors and or clients, we are unable to share the Smartsheet sheet for privacy purposes etc., hence the online form would be perfect.

Ideally we would love to do that in Smartsheet by creating an online form where the process above (email + excel) could be replaced by Smartsheet in a single work.

Any ideas?

Thanks

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Accepted answers

Thiago Castro

Hi @Andrée Starå

It would be a good idea if we had a view of the requirements of each vendor / client.

Here's a quick scenario:

Regional Manager from Company A receives the form, in the form there are standard questions we require for this tender we are bidding, let's say 20 questions.

Regional Manager knows the answer to 5 questions and believes someone in the finance team can respond to another 5 and the sales team another 10 (total 20). Currently in Smartsheet for the Regional Manager to respond he would need to 1. respond the form → submit → share the form link with the finance team and also with the sales team. Someone will open the form (blank) and start to answer the questions (Risks: They could re-answer the same questions the Regional Manager already did, either duplicating unnecessary work or providing different response which would lead to confusion), the same situation would happen at the other team.

When you share an Excel file for example, you can Track changes, you can save your responses and share the file with the other teams to populate the file and someone would send the file back to me for example with the entire questionnaire completed.

As this is NOT a recurring situation for us and we don't have visibility of who of each company would be responding the questions, the effort required to build something like you mentioned VS the ROI would not be justifiable.

I appreciate everyone's input though.

All comments

Genevieve P.

Hi @Thiago Castro

It does sound like a Smartsheet Form could help with some of this process; you could set up Conditional Rules in your form so based on their initial response (perhaps saying what department is answering) then it only shows them the relevant questions.

However, keep in mind that every time a new response is submitted from the form it will create a new Row in Smartsheet. This could mean if John, Joanne, Rebekah and yourself all fill in the form using different fields, you will have 4 separate rows that collected the data. Would that work for your purposes?

You may also want to consider having separate sheets per client, and then use a Report to gather all their data into one location. This way you can share the sheet view with them if they need to make changes to their original form submission, but then they won't see the other clients information.

If neither of the above processes will work, you may also want to look into the premium application Dynamic View which would allow users to update/edit any of their own specific rows without seeing the source sheet data.

If you're still wanting advice or help in how to set up your form / Smartsheet sheet, it would be really useful to be able to see a screen capture example of the type of email you send out & excel attachment that you're using to collect this information, but please block out any sensitive data!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Thiago Castro

Hi Genevieve,

Thanks for your response. The options you provided I had previously explored. I have several forms in place that works in the way you proposed.

As in this instance, we are talking about a survey with vendors and clients where in some Companies, several people from the organisation may answer the questions and in others it may be just one person to answer all questions.

The Premium Application Dynamic View is something I investigated in the past but for something ad-hoc like this we may end up using the old good Excel or build individual forms in Microsoft Forms and or Monkey Survey.

Thanks.

Stefan

Hi @Thiago Castro ,

I second @Genevieve P 's suggestion to use a sheet per involved client/party + a report for yourself bringing it all together. The client sheet can be accessible all the time to the clients and if you want to, you can use automation to copy/move rows in those sheets to a sheet of your liking. Doesn't matter then, if one or multiple people from a client are require to provide input in their sheet.

That said, I admit that it's a solution only for a defined process. If you have constantly changing clients/partners, this will be too much of a hassle.

Link Genevieve wrote, some more real life detail/example would be helpful to understand your need. For example I have a hard time understanding, why gathering input via MS forms or Monkey would be better in your case given all the copy & pasting needed to consolidate data.

Hope this helps somehow

Stefan

Thiago Castro

Hi Stefan

"That said, I admit that it's a solution only for a defined process. If you have constantly changing clients/partners, this will be too much of a hassle."

Your comment above summarises this situation. The examples you and Genevieve provided we currently have in place, I've used the Smartsheet forms in many ways, incuding what you guys suggested, for this specific case is different, but that's all good.

I appreciate the responses.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Thiago Castro

To add to Genevieve's and Stefan's excellent advice/answer.

A possible solution could be to use forms combined with placeholders. (it's possible to create the form URL's automatically and also send them out through Smartsheet with workflows)

Something like this.

Each organization gets sent its form with pre-filled information (hidden)
They could add their name/email if needed
Everything would be collected in one sheet, and we could use filters, reports, or a cross-sheet formula structure to collet everything together as needed.

What do you think?

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Thiago Castro

Hi @Andrée Starå

It would be a good idea if we had a view of the requirements of each vendor / client.

Here's a quick scenario:

Regional Manager from Company A receives the form, in the form there are standard questions we require for this tender we are bidding, let's say 20 questions.

I appreciate everyone's input though.

Andrée Starå

@Thiago Castro

Happy to help!

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