Opinio Online Surveys

Features

The WEG survey service is powered by a Java web application called Opinio. Opinio is an end-to-end survey solution that enables you to:

• Build a survey
• Invite respondents via email
• Host the survey
• Report on the results

Guest Account

We invite UCAR employees to try out the survey service using our guest account. Please use this account for demo purposes only. Do not build real surveys.

Account Requests

If you decide to use the WEG Survey Service, please send an email to webmaster@ucar.edu indicating that you want a survey account and the name of your group so we can create a private folder for you. Also indicate how many survey respondents you plan on inviting to take your survey.

Tips

Testing Your Survey

While you are modifying the survey attributes and questions, the survey will be locked and not available for responses. Once you are ready to test your survey, click the traffic light icon in the main screen for your survey to turn it green. You can test your survey with the "click to preview survey" link or by clicking Publish Survey and then Invitations to test the email invitation module.

Once you have entered one or more responses, you can see what reports will look like by clicking the Reports and data link. You can use the Look and feel link to change text in your survey without deleting responses. Note however that once you have entered a response, you will not be able to go into the survey attributes or questions screens without first deleting responses. You may need to delete both incomplete responses and complete responses before you are able to make modifications to your survey based on test feedback. While inconvenient, this feature protects you from making changes to the structure of your survey in the middle of collecting responses that would invalidate the relevance of your results. This further underlines the importance of fully testing your survey before finally making it available for official responses.

Enable the Back Button

We recommend you enable the Back button in Survey Attributes. The Back button enable users to navigate back and forth through multi-page surveys more reliably. Different web browsers deal with form caching in different ways and the Opinio Back button makes sure any data filled out in a previous form will be displayed.

Enable the Save Button

The Save button, which you can enable in Survey Attributes, enables users to click Save at any point in a survey, enter their email address, and receive a link via email that enables them to resume their survey response at their convenience.

Email Invitations

The message field in Email invitations contains code that automatically generates a unique URL for each invitee. Please do not change that code. You can modify the message around it, but leave the URL code intact.

Email Reminders

Opinio can send email reminders automatically to users who have not yet completed the survey. You set this up when you first create your invitation. We recommend you not remind users more than twice and not more every 7 days. In fact, it's best to see how your response rate goes since a reminder may not even be necessary. A response rate of 10% is considered good. If you are not realizing your response rate goals, consider sending a reminder at the midpoint of the time period your survey is open for and again a few days before the end date.

To send a reminder email manually, click on the View link for the invitation you already sent out. You will see who has and has not responded so far. Check the Resend checkbox for anyone who hasn't responded and click Resend. If you want, you can modify the invitation message before you do this to be a reminder message instead of the original message you sent.

Turn off cumulative statistics in reports

Unless you find them useful, the cumulative statistics in the summary report can be somewhat distracting. You can hide them by clicking Reports > Summary Reports > Advanced Attributes and then hiding the cumulative items.

Privacy

The privacy of survey respondents is often sensitive in nature. Opinio offers a number of options for anonymous and non-anonymous response collection in survey attributes. The WEG provides each account with it's own surveys folder. Only your account and the WEG admin account have access to read the contents of your folder. The WEG takes the privacy and confidentiality of survey data seriously and will not allow anyone other than you access to your survey data. Survey data is stored in a MySQL database which can only be accessed by a WEG admin account and the Opinio application. If you have privacy or security concerns about your survey, please feel free to contact us at webmaster@ucar.edu.