Pre-populating Surveys |
You may already have information about your visitors, such as a login user ID. You can use this information to construct a custom survey for each visitor, with pre-filled information. All you have to do is to construct a custom URL and tell them to go there.
This feature is used by Invite Lists. It can also be used with external systems of any kind that can create a dynamic URL.
For a single page survey, the URL starts with:
http://yourcompany.com/ViewsFlash/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=showform&pollid=pollingplace!poll
and continues with a series of names and values. For example:
&userid=443344&name=John%20Tower
For a multi-page survey, the URL starts with:
http://yourcompany.com/ViewsFlash/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=page&pollid=pollingplace!poll
When the visitor goes to this URL, the survey indicated by pollid will appear in their browser. The name field in the survey form will already contain "John Tower", and the userid field (which could be a hidden field) will already contain 443344.
The appearance of the visitor's name, used judiciously, can greatly increase his/her level of comfort answering your survey. The userid can be used to correlate survey answers with other data you may have already, and can also be used to prevent duplicate voting.
This URL can be created by a publishing system so that it appears on a page as:
We'd like you to take our survey.
The underlying link should be:
http://yourcompany.com/ViewsFlash/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=showform&pollid=pollingplace!poll&userid=4444&name=John
The same URL can also be used in an e-mail. With HTML e-mail, the URL will look just as above. For text-only, it should be:
/ViewsFlash/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=showform&pollid=pollingplace!poll&userid=4444&name=John%20Tower