Options for surveys in Vanilla

Alex Dunne
Alex Dunne Vanilla Ice Cream

Hi everyone!

I'm wondering if anyone has used Vanilla to create surveys? Here's my use case and what I'm trying to accomplish:

I work for a SAAS company and we are using the Groups functionality to host a private beta community for an upcoming feature. When the beta ends, we want to send a survey out to the participants but we also want to minimize the amount of channels we're using to communicate with our users. Since all communication is going through our community, we're hoping to keep the survey to our community as well.

I know I could link to a Survey Monkey for instance, but has anyone done anything different with regards to sending surveys to their community members?

Thanks in advance!

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Best Answer

  • Adrian
    Adrian HLV Staff Alumni
    #2 Answer ✓

    You can embed a Survey Monkey in a pocket or you can consider something like HotJar which is free. You can have a pop up survey. Hope that helps!

Answers

  • Adrian
    Adrian HLV Staff Alumni
    #3 Answer ✓

    You can embed a Survey Monkey in a pocket or you can consider something like HotJar which is free. You can have a pop up survey. Hope that helps!

  • Alex Dunne
    Alex Dunne Vanilla Ice Cream

    Thanks Adrian! That's super helpful

  • Adrian
    Adrian HLV Staff Alumni

    Glad I could help :)

  • Kara
    Kara Vanilla Ice Cream

    Hi @Alex Dunne! We have attempted to use the Groups feature for our beta testers is various user groups, but have found them completely unsuccessful due to the lack of notifications for Groups currently offered. Our IT team has deemed SurveyMonkey insecure, so we rely on internally created forms for surveys and we'll link to those from the community for certain private groups.

    We do use polls in our general discussion categories to occasionally gather casual feedback.

    Kara

  • To this point - it may be easier to use a private category and have users follow that category if they're part of the beta group.

  • Alex Dunne
    Alex Dunne Vanilla Ice Cream

    Hi @BrendanP and @Kara ,

    Thank you for your suggestions! I didn't realize there weren't any options for notifications in Groups... bit of an issue there. Can I ask how you have managed with private categories? From what I can see I'd have to create a special role and assign that to beta users then make sure only people with that role can see the category... would I be right in thinking that?

    Thanks

    Alex

  • Adrian
    Adrian HLV Staff Alumni

    @Alex Dunne Correct, you can create a private category with a special role, where only they can view. Make sure you select "Custom Permissions" when you create the category.

  • Tmetcalf
    Tmetcalf Vanilla Seedling

    Good day Community -
    Has this functionality changed; can a survey be created and launched from community without a 3rd party tool like Survey Monkey? I would like to build and deploy from my community to my community members.
    Should I submit a product suggestion?

    Thank you,
    Toby

    @BrendanP

  • Hi Toby! At this point we have the polls option, but it is definitely not robust enough to call a survey tool. You could ask a question that could normally be on a survey, but there is no open text option, which to me is a critical part of a survey strategy. There are a number of suggestions about polls in our product area that might be interesting to support.

    TL;DR - you can ask very limited question types within the community through the poll feature (1 at a time)

  • Tmetcalf
    Tmetcalf Vanilla Seedling

    Thank you for replying @Heather Wendt