Creating & Managing Survey Questions

Survey Questions are a campaign’s primary tool for collecting information from their voters. In this section users will learn how to create, edit, copy, and archive questions.

It's important to follow naming conventions when creating questions and tags for various canvassing events. We put together a document on how to name your survey questions. By following these guidelines, we will be able to keep Votivate's data standardized and cleaned.

Naming Conventions Document

CREATING QUESTIONS

Navigate to Questions & Tags. 

Before creating a new question, review the questions to ensure that the question you want to create doesn’t already exist. If you see a question similar to yours, you may also copy questions and edit them, which we will go over further down below. 

If you do not see your question, select + New Question. You will then be brought to this page.

Fill in the required fields accordingly:

• • The full question should be the question that you are asking voters. You will want to also include the designation (IE or Cord) and the election (Primary, General).
  • The short question is what will appear when you are bulk uploading. Best practice is to add the designation and election if you have the space.
    • • For example: IE P22 J. Smith Voter ID
  • If applicable, mark whether this question is relevant statewide or to the specific campaign.
    • • Include states that should have access to this question.
  • Mark campaign type (Candidate or Issue).
  • If it is an issue, enter the issue name.

To add multiple answers to a question, select  + Add Another Answer. 

• Answers will include long form and short. Make sure to add all of the possible answers to your question. We recommend "yes/no" questions to start, or questions for your program that have concise answers.
• The long answers should reflect the answers in your script.
• The short answers should be a word or two if possible. They are used to map answers in bulk uploads. These keys are what will be displayed on walksheets.

Firewall Designation: 

• Coordinated: coordinated campaigns are when organizations cooperate directly with a candidate, a candidate’s authorized committee, or their agents.
• Independent Expenditure (IE): An independent expenditure is an expenditure for a communication that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, which is not in coordination with any candidate or their campaign or political party.

Once you have filled out all of the fields. Select Save. 

COPYING QUESTIONS

If there is a question that already exists and the text is almost exactly the same as your own question but the candidate name or election date is different, simply copy that question and make the necessary changes to it. 

1. Select the question from the canvass questions list.
2. In the “Edit Question” screen, select Save As which will create a new copy of the question.
3. Edit the text to reflect your own question. 

ARCHIVING QUESTIONS

If you would like to remove a question from your campaign, thus hiding it from targeting, exports, bulk uploads, and sheet formats for all users, you can archive a question.

This will not completely delete your question. You can still restore it later. Additionally, your canvass answers will remain saved.

1. Select the question from the canvass questions list. 
2. Select Archive.
   

A pop-up window will appear. Select I’m sure, archive it. 

To access archived questions, go back to the canvass questions list, and select the box that says Show Archived.

To restore a question, select the question from the list and then select Restore.