Anonymous and Non-Anonymous Surveys

When you are conducting a survey that requires visibility into each recipients responses, you conduct a non-anonymous survey! How does that differ from anonymous surveys? How do you set up a non-anonymous survey? Last but not least, how do the report exports differ from that of anonymous surveys?

Anonymous Surveys and Responses

Normally, whenever you create a new survey type (a themed category under which surveys fall), the anonymity threshold is automatically set to 5. What this means is that the surveys under that survey type need at least 5 responses for the results to be seen.

This is consistent even as you filter into certain attributes. If you try to narrow your results down to your department (for example, Executive) and the Executive department only has 2 responses, then those responses will be greyed out and unable to click on, making them inaccessible.

Whenever you need the anonymity threshold to be changed to above or below 5, you can reach out to your Surveys and Insights Consultant, who will guide you through what those changes entail and make those adjustments for you.

Anonymous Comments

When the number of responses for an open-ended question (text response) is below 5, then the user will not be able to access those results. However, if a question (multiple choice, rating, yes/no, etc.) has the option to leave a comment turned on, in that case if the responses are above 5, the optional comments can be shown, even if the number of comments themselves are below 5.

Anonymous Results Export

You can download either the summarized report or the excel data report, with neither of them showing the employees and their responses. The reports can be accessed by clicking on export at the top right (the overview page only gives you access to the summary report).

Non-Anonymous Surveys and Responses

In order to have a non-anonymous survey, they have to fall under a survey type that has an anonymity threshold of 1. What this means is that there has to be at least 1 response in the survey for the results to be visible. This setting also means that the the individual and their responses can be seen, so their answers are not confidential.

We emphasize clear communication with the employees so that they are aware that the survey will be non-anonymous and they can decide whether to participate or not accordingly. We recommend a three-step method to ensuring that all survey recipients are aware that they will be taking a non-anonymous survey.

• Through the survey email content.
• Through the landing page of the survey.
• By sending an internal email to all employees who will be participating in the survey.

All comments and responses are visible and there are no responses greyed out when filtering attributes when the anonymity threshold has been set to 1.

Non-Anonymous Results Export

When a non-anonymous survey has been conducted and the results are collected, there is an individual report that can be downloaded in addition to the summary report. The individual report contains not only the responses, but also the employees who left those responses, which provides full transparency.

The individual report includes First Name, Last Name, Employee Id, Email, Manager Employee Id, Completion Date, Start Date, all the attributes associated with that particular employee as mentioned in the employee file (Department, Location, etc.), as well as the responses to each question.

Again, when conducting non-anonymous surveys, it is very important that it is communicated with the participants at each step of the survey taking process that the responses recorded will be non-anonymous.