Out of our nearly 20,000 alums online (after we removed those who are deceased) and after sending out emails to the 3500 valid email addresses we have, we would still like to contact our many remaining alumni. We're going to send out in the next couple of weeks about 14,500 paper surveys which are the equivalent of the online survey we have.

We have a couple of volunteers who will take the surveys and (we think) enter them online. What we think we'd like to do is enter the survey based on the person's record (I guess effectively logging into that person's record so that when the questions are answers that person's name is attached to the answers).

Any suggestions on how or if this can be done? Seems like this might actually generate some conversation on the whole approach to collecting this data.

Thanks

Having the ADMIN fill out a survey as the classmate is on the Task List, but isn't possible at this time.

You currently would have to create a USERNAME/PASSWORD for the classmate, then sign-in as that classmate, fill out the survey. If you did this, then the classmate would then NOT BE ABLE TO create their own Username/Password if they ever decided to sign up for the website because they wouldn't show up as "JOIN NOW" when they clicked on their photo on the Classmate Photos.

I have a suggested alternative. Create your survey at www.formstack.com. You can include the same exact questions you had with your online. As you get the paper responses, the assisting people you refer to can enter the responses by completing online surveys. The beauty of this is - all results go into a spreadhseet type database and you can do reporting of statistics from it and you can download the information to use with any local database you have. You can also put a link to this survey on your Classcreator website - so that when anyone completes it electronically, their results go to the same database.

I used these surveys several times - both ways. Either completely collecting info electronically by the survey responders or as a combination of electronically collected plus my entering of paper collected.

Interesting approach - I had thought of giving a few volunteers the Admin Survey privilege and letting them just enter these results under their admin account. The advantage of your approach as I see it is that we'll be able to capture the demographic information that we're including on the paper version. We'll have to think a bit more on this. Thanks for your suggestion!

You can also create your own template if you like. Here is a sample of one of mine. I put a link on my homepage to this "Guestbook". Go ahead and click the link below. Click on the answers and you will see conditional questions come up as well. You can complete it if you like and just put something in the comments section that this is a test from the Admin Forums. I'll then delete the responses.

http://www.formstack.com/forms/?987176-OpNqnia7du

I think there was a problem with my link. Here it is again

http://www.formstack.com/forms/?987176-OpNqnia7du

This looks good - I did notice that without paying we're limited to only 50 people and 10 items per form. While we only have 9 questions, we do have some demographic data that we'll enter. Since this committee is kinda scrunched for money, I doubt they'll be willing to pay $14 per month. Then again, maybe if we "rent" if for 2 months, I would pay and call it my donation???

PROG SITE ADMINISTRATOR wrote:

http://www.formstack.com/forms/?987176-OpNqnia7du

Corrected link. After you paste the link in; highlight it and click on the chain link in the editor panel, then paste the link in the URL window that pops up.

Google has something similar I also use under Documents/Spreadsheets. You create a "survey" template and then the results of surveys entered go to a spreadsheet automatically for you. There's no cost for this. It's not as intuitive but it serves the purpose. I'm sure you could do it. For my purposes, I felt the cost for Formstack was worth it. I had to go up to the next level (I think $29/mo?). But since I'm paying for it, I have made more use of it to get my $$ worth.

Thanks, John. I had clicked the chain first and then just put the url between the bracketed URL indicators.

Two things here:

1) We added a Survey export tool. What is it currently not doing that you'd like it to do?

2) If we add a dropdown list of Classmates above any survey when viewed by an Admin, that would allow you to select a name and then complete the survey on behalf of the Classmate. Would that be sufficient?

For obvious reasons we want to eliminate the need to have to use a third party tool.

Brad Switzer wrote:

I like this approach, Brad.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Not sure if you were asking this of me or everyone. This sounds good. In one of my cases, the particular survey I am using is for "lurkers" or non-classmates from our class who happen to visit the site. I am trying to capture some information from these people and determine if they wish to be added as Guests. Thus, they would not be listed in the Classmates list.

While non members can now see survey pages, they cannot submit them. Only members can complete a survey.

Our group is finally back on track with the paper survey. They should be out in the mail today or tomorrow. The export looks good for us. The second point about adding a dropdown to choose the classmate to add the survey to sounds like the right kind of thing. Unfortunately, in our case that dropdown would contain either our entire active list (over 20,000) or at least those we sent out to (about 14,000), so there probably needs to be a different way to find a classmate. I apologize for not talking with you earlier about this, but after some difficult times on that committee, in the last week we've finally gotten movement. Things are starting to get better. Anyway, thanks for whatever you can do.

There's a way to do it. Not at the top of the Task List at the moment but when we make the next Survey Maker update this will be included.

Ok but in the meantime, what might you suggest? I'm guessing that we're going to get maybe even a thousand or more returns via regular mail. Kyle said that if a committee member logged into an classmate's space, that would prevent that classmate from logging in by him/herself in the future - this may not be a problem since they're already sending in the survey - also if they did want in, couldn't we just reset the password?

Is there a way to set up a user without going through each of the steps of the wizard to save some time? After setting up the username the survey committee member would then click on the online survey and enter it, then log out.

Does this seem like a way to go, maybe the only way? Is this going to cause us any other problems?

I had originally thought of creating a whole bunch of dummy alum accounts somethinglike alum0001, alum0002, etc, but you still have to log in and at least this way, they can update the demographics of the person.

If this seems to make sense, we can go ahead with a plan to do this efficiently and quickly.

You can log in as the Classmate to fill out their survey and then log out -- doing that is just fine. Just make sure you don't join the site on behalf of the Classmate. If you did that like Kyle said you'd stop them from joining, and if you delete the Classmate you'll also delete their survey result.

No, you cannot join the site without going through the wizard, and you can't complete a survey on behalf of a member who has never joined.

The only you to enter surveys on behalf of other site members (who have joined) is to wait for us to update the Survey Maker with the next round of revisions. As much as I'd love to do that now, we won't be doing much other than the major system restructure currently ongoing for the next 8 weeks. Lots of things can't happen here until this is complete.

I'm trying to fully understand what you just wrote (I'm not trying to "pick a fight" so to speak). We're sending the paper survey to those that haven't joined (in fact, some will never join because they don't use computers). So even with your upgrade, we still wouldn't be able to enter a survey for an alum because they still needed to have joined and they haven't. I think we're stuck with either hand categorizing the responses or paying what would be pretty hefty fees (the cheapest we found is $149) to enter them online (I'm sure from 14,000 mail surveys we'll get at least 100 back in the mail).

Bear with me now - I created an alum James Hancock, logged out of my admin account, found James Hancock (class of 1915) and went through the login/registration procedure then logged out. I thought I remembered the password I used, but apparently forgot it. So I logged on as an admin, went to James Hancock's profile page, changed the password, saved it and logged out. I then was able to log in to James Hancock's account with the new password. It seems like I have full access to everything. I even tried the same thing by changing both his username and password as an admin, then was able to log in as James Hancock.

What problems will I be causing with our database or our alums if we do this for each paper survey we use? Though the alum won't go through the wizard, he/she still seems to have full access even if an admin changes the password and possibly the email address.

If we do this (and it doesn't cause other problems, which I don't see right now), I also know that we'll need to get rid of the fake email addresses for those who return paper surveys without an email address.

Again, I'm trying to solve a problem on our end in a way that will allow collection of survey stats and won't cost us an additional bunch of money.

You can join on behalf of a Classmate and enter his or her survey response, but I'd only recommend doing that if you're absolutely sure the Classmate is never going to join the site. Other than doing that, you are correct that it is impossible to enter survey responses for members who don't exist on the site.

Prior to logging in as a Classmate it's good practice to click the "Log Out" link. This removes the Admin login cookie from your computer so you won't wind up inadvertently seeing Admin functions on your site while logged in as a Classmate.