Capturing contact data in hidden questions

To use your contact data in reports, you can save it in hidden questions. This takes unstructured text data and turns it into structured data that can be analyzed.

Structured vs. unstructured

The first thing you need to determine for each contact field that you want to have in your reports is if its contents are structured or unstructured.

  • Structured — Data that has only a few unique values facross all of your contacts. For instance: age, gender or department.
  • Unstructured — Data that is almost always unique per contact, like employee number, or name.

Structured data should be placed in hidden questions. Unstructured data does not need to be in most cases.

Analyzing and presenting data

Think about how you want to analyze and present your data ahead of time.

For example, say you have birth dates or ages in a contact field. If you know that you want to present your survey results with a breakdown based on certain age categories, you can set that up ahead of time. Create a hidden question with the age categories as answer choices and prefill them based on the respondents age. That way, you have a closed question for which you can easily make charts, filters, and breakouts.

Structured text values

Structured text values.

  1. Add a new dropdown question to the bottom of the first page of your survey.
  2. On the first tab, enter the name of the contact field as the question text.
  3. Enter the first known value from the contact field as an answer choice (for instance, a department name). You don't have to add them all.
  4. Select the Settings tab and enter the name of the contact field as a data label.
  5. Select the Prefill tab and select the contact field that you want to capture.
  6. If there are additional values that may appear in that contact field that are not yet answer choices, select Yes from the If not found, add as new answer choice? dropdown. For instance, if you added only one department in step 3, selecting Yes here will automatically add departments as answer choices as responses come in.
  7. Click Save.
  8. Before you hide the question, it is important to test to make sure prefilling works. Preview your survey as a contact by navigating to Distribute > Contacts and clicking Preview next to one of your contacts. The correct answer should be selected in the question you added.
  9. Go back to the questions and select the dropdown next to the question and select Hide. This will hide the question from respondents but it will be prefilled in the background.

Structured numeric values

  1. Add a new slider question to the bottom of the first page of your survey.
  2. On the first tab, enter the name of the contact field as the question text.
  3. Select the Settings tab and enter the name of the contact field as a data label.
  4. Set the minimum and maximum values wide enough to allow for all the values in your contact field.
  5. Select the Prefill tab and select the contact field that you want to capture.
  6. Click Save.
  7. Preview your survey as a contact by navigating to Distribute > Contacts and clicking Preview next to one of your contacts. The correct answer should be selected in the question you added.
  8. Go back to the questions and select the dropdown next to the question and select Hide. This will hide the question from respondents but it will be prefilled in the background.

Structured date values

You can prefill dates by using the date picker question. This will result in various options in reports. For example, say you are a telecom operator sending out a post-installation survey and one of your contact fields holds the installation date. A contact field is only seen as text, but once you prefill it into a date picker, it becomes a true date. In your report, you would like to show the average satisfaction score by month. Normally a timeline element in the ReportBuilder will use the date responded as its basis. But in this case, that is not what you want, since someone who had an installation at the end of November may answer the survey at the beginning of December. You want to use the installation date in the chart. To do that, complete the following steps:

  1. Add a new date picker question to the bottom of the first page of your survey.
  2. On the first tab, enter the name of the contact field as the question text.
  3. Select the Settings tab and enter the name of the contact field as a data label.
  4. Set the minimum and maximum values wide enough to allow for all the values in your contact field.
  5. Select the Prefill tab and select the contact field that you want to capture. Make sure the date in that field has the following syntax: yyyy-mm-dd.
  6. Click Save.
  7. Preview your survey as a contact by navigating to Distribute > Contacts and clicking Preview next to one of your contacts. The correct answer should be selected in the question you added.
  8. Go back to the questions and select the dropdown next to the question and select Hide. This will hide the question from respondents but it will be prefilled in the background.
Note: The prefilled value is only saved once the respondent clicks Next on the page that contains the hidden question.

Tips

You can capture a contact field more than once. For instance, you have an age field. In reporting, you feel sure that you will want to filter or break out based on certain age categories. Instead of only capturing the age in a hidden slider question, which will give you insights like average and median age, you will also want to create a hidden radio buttons question with the age categories you will want to have in the reporting and then use a CSL if/then/else statement in the prefilling to fill each age category. That will give you detailed age info and age categories.

You can find an example of the CSL code you would need to prefill the age category question on the CSL snippets page.