Leveraging forms for satisfaction surveys

Julie Bryant

Dear community,

I aim to capture feedback from stakeholders on specific projects (triggered by a % completion and /or a duration). My survey needs to allow:

1. To display a couple informative fields (as captured in my main grid) – without an option to edit these
2. To capture 3 pieces of information (one of them being free text with sensitive comments so was thinking of capturing all results in a separate grid)
3. Each project is likely to have multiple results scores:
   1. From multiple stakeholders
   2. At various times for long projects (ie. recurrent 6-monthly surveys)

I have played with forms vs automation workflows but am struggling with:

1. The form doesn’t allow me to display information to my “surveyee” – for this I need to go to workflow automation (but then can’t see how I can capture multiple results for 1 project)
2. I need survey results to be tied to their project identifier (to average the various scores at project level
3. The format offered by the automation workflow is not super pretty – that’s a vain comment I know 😊

Any tips and advice gratefully received!

Julie

Genevieve P.

Hi @Julie Bryant

It does sound like an Update Request workflow is the way to gather this information.

You can lock columns in the source sheet which will make fields Read Only in the Request form, and this would ensure data is associated with the Project Identifier.

In this instance you would send out one Update form per-row, or if you need multiple comments on each row then you'd need to set up multiple columns for each stage of the project and send these specific columns out at certain times.

The other option would be to set up a Report grouping by Project Identifier so your stakeholders can fill out multiple rows at once, however they would need access to the underlying sheet to fill out the rows through a Report.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Julie Bryant

Thank you so much @Genevieve P. for taking the time to answer. This is useful and I see how the Update Request would work. My issue with this is the format it is sent as.

The Contacts I will survey don't necessarily have access to Smartsheet (not a problem there) but my columns label are simple (PM Score, Project Support Recommendation, Comments). I'd love to survey them with additional guidance (ie. "On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being Completely Dissatisfied to 5 being Completely Satisfied, please rate how satisfied or dissatisfied you are with the overall management of your project.") which the Update Request workflow doesn't give me an option to do - unless I am missing something obvious?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Julie Bryant

You're correct, Update Requests show the fields to update without allowing you to add helper text to each field.

I would suggest adding any helper text to the Message itself, the paragraph that shows in the email and at the top of the form. Although it won't appear right next to the field, you can add clear direction at the top based on your field names.

Cheers,

Genevieve