So, once you have created your survey, you’d probably like some or all of the subjects in your department to take the survey, right? This is what survey distribution is all about.

A word about distributions… A survey distribution represents one time that you’ve sent a survey out. A distribution is associated with a survey and the subjects that have been invited to take the survey. The answers a subject gives to this distribution are connected to that distribution. If you want to send the survey again, you’ll probably want to create a new “distribution” then to group together the subjects and responses for this round of interactions with the survey.

When you create a survey, an initial distribution is automatically created for you. This distribution has a name and it “Version 1”. When you click on the Distributions tab associated with a survey, you’ll see all of the distributions of that survey that have been made in the past.

In the above screen clip there is one survey distribution associated with this survey… and that’s Version 1. If you click on the “Select…” button next to a distribution, you’ll be able to see more about that distribution… like who took it and what their answers were. You’ll also be able to add more users to the distribution.

In the above screen clip, nobody two sub-tabs display. One is the recipients tab and the other is the results tab associated with that distribution. Here, we see I’ve not added any subjects to the distribution. When I do though, they’ll be shown on this first list. For now, I’ll click the Add More… button so I can add a couple of friends to my survey distribution to see what they think about dogs…

Since I said I wanted to add more people, the system puts up a page that allows me to search and select those I want to add. I can subset the list of subjects by ID, Name, or the category/subcategory I’ve assigned to the folks in my department. I can select a subject individually from the presented list of add all shown in the list all at once.

Once I’ve added a person to the distribution, they show up in the list of recipients for the distribution:

We can see then in this list who has been invited and whether or note they have started the survey, completed it or declined. We can see that Alaina has not yet started this survey. That’s ok… I know how she feels about dogs… 😉

The Survey Distribution Recipients page lets you add everyone at once, remove every, and even remind those that haven’t taken it that they should.

You can also tell the system that for those that haven’t started the survey by now, go ahead and mark them as declined and move on with life.

The Results tab is what it sounds like… per question, you’ll be able to see what percent of the population answered each question a particular way.

Survey distributions can get quite complicated, especially if you have multiple times that you want a survey distribute and you want the system to always distribute to a predefined set of users.