Data Gathering Form Events

There are many instances where an organization may wish to poll or ask particular questions of their membership. While we refer to this event type as a “survey” it can be used for other purposes as well.

To coordinate preferences: As an example, if we are ordering uniforms for some subset of people in our on-line database, we may want people to fill out a form with details such as style preferences, color preferences or size information. By requiring people to login, they are “authenticated” adding to the security of these sorts of forms and helping to ensure that the data gathered is accurate.

The have members fill in a standard form: If you wish to have all of your members fill in a standard form (a member satisfaction survey as an example or a form that validates their personal contact information), this type of event that requires respondents to be “logged in” to the system with a valid user-name or password is appropriate. Having people log-in eliminates the possibility of duplicated responses from the same person, bogus responses or accidental responses by people outside of your membership base.

Setting up forms to gather information requires the creator of the survey activity to define a simple questionnaire involving custom data gathering fields. Details on how to setup these questionnaires are included in section YYY of this document. As with other event types, responses to these on-line surveys and questionnaires are available in a summarized format from the web-site (“View Event Responses” under the “Calendar & Events” Menus) and the responses for any on-line event can be easily downloaded in CSV format readable by Microsoft Excel and other tools. To setup one of these on-line questionnaires to which members can respond, the following sections of the event definition need to be completed:

Event Description: This is where you would provide an overview of the survey or questionnaire, describe its purpose and how information gathered will be used.

Registration Configuration: In this field you’ll configure whether to make the survey visible to the public, whether to allow public respondents to create member accounts on the fly etc.

Setup Data Collection Fields: This is where the actual questions are defined and users are provided specific instructions on how to go about answering the questions.