60. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW T he following concepts and questions will help you to get the most out of using the survey tool in CiviCampaign.
KEY CONCEPTS T hese concepts are not about creating and undertaking surveys in general, but about the specific use of the survey tool in CiviCampaign.
Custom Fields and Profiles CiviCampaign surveys use custom profiles to capture survey participants' responses. Once you've decided on your questions and the types of responses, you need to create a custom field set for the questions and responses, and create option values if you're collecting multiple choice responses. You can then create the custom profile that will display the appropriate fields to enter the responses to the survey questions. T o learn more about how to create custom field sets, see the chapter called Custom Fields in the section Organising Your Data. T o learn how to create a custom profile, see the chapter Profiles in the same section.
Reserving and releasing respondents Before you can capture responses to your survey, you need to create a group made up of the contacts you are seeking responses from. T his could be an existing group within your contacts, or you may need to create a group specifically for the survey. Survey describes this process as reserving respondents. When the contact has completed the survey and their data recorded, they are released from this group. You can learn more about creating groups in the chapter Groups and T ags in the section Organising Your Data. Surveys are designed to capture responses from existing contacts; if you are seeking responses from the wider public, use the Petition tool; see the Petitions section for information on this.
CiviCampaign and CiviEngage Surveys are part of the functionality of the CiviCampaign component, so you must have this enabled in order to use surveys; however, you can create surveys that are not connected to a specific campaign. For example, an organisation may wish to conduct a membership satisfaction service to assess the performance of their own service, without having it associated with a campaign. See the Campaigns section for information about setting up CiviCampaign. Drupal sites with the module CiviEngage enabled, will have additional result set options profiles that configure surveys to allow you to track the status of responses to the survey. T o find out more about how CiviEngage enhances the Survey feature, see the section called Civic Engagement.
Drupal Permissions If you are using Drupal, you need to set permissions to allow specific roles to Reserve Campaign Contacts and Release Campaign Contacts when conducting the surveys. T o learn more about setting Drupal permissions, go to the Drupal documentation at http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/admin/user/permissions.
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