Hi and welcome to Devil Nation Media. I’m Mark Davidson. Today we’re going to create a survey using polldaddy.com. This tutorial follows the video on how to create a poll, so if you haven’t already, you’ll want to check that out.
As with a poll, a survey is a great way to collect public opinion from our readers. It allow viewers to give us more in-depth information, and we can even use it to gather sources for personality profiles. Plus, it’s a great tool to help us plan for future stories.
It helps us interact with our audience in a meaningful way, so think about how including a survey could benefit Devil Nation Media when creating content for the site.
Let’s get started.
Head over to polldaddy.com. By now you should already have an account. If you don’t check out the previous video to see how to do that.
Remember you used your school email, and your password should be your student ID.
Go ahead and log in.
Once again we are at polldaddy’s dashboard. You should see the poll you already created under “Your media”
Click on the blue box and select “survey” from the dropdown window.
So this time we are creating a survey instead of a poll. This allows us to gather more detailed, multi-faceted information on a topic rather than just asking one question.
Our first step in creating a survey is done under the settings tab. We need to give our survey a title. Poll daddy allows us to name the survey one thing but show a different title to the public. For our purposes, you should title the survey the same as it will be displayed. For this tutorial, I’m creating a survey to gather information for an upcoming feature story on student drivers and the traffic pattern around the school. My title should reflect that.
You also have the option to create a custom message for your survey. This is a good opportunity to tell our readers what the purpose of the survey is and why they should complete it. Could they be a source for a future story? Can they weigh in on an important issue? Could they win a prize? Whatever you write here, keep it simple and to the point.
Other options on this page allow you to show a progress indicator and a back button. You’ll only need the progress indicator if your are creating a multi-page survey, and for our student audience, you want to avoid making the survey too long. We want surveys to be quick and painless so that students will want to take them.
At the bottom of the page, we have “survey options.” Do you want to close your survey after a certain date? Will you allow multiple responses from the same devices? (This is probably a good idea as our students share Chromebook carts and computer labs.)
The next step is the question editor. Here you can add your questions. Looking down the left side of the screen, you can see the options available. Just drag and drop the type of question you want to add. For this assignment, you need to add three different types of questions, and your survey needs to be at least five questions, but not more than 10.
Skip the page header, since our surveys will only be one page. Let’s add a question.
I’m going to add a multiple choice question, so I just drag one here. When you do this, a box will pop up so you can write your question and create your possible answers. So I’m going to put in my question and record my answers.
You also have several other options to customize your survey, which is one of the reasons I like poll daddy. You can add media, include an “other” option, or make the question mandatory. When creating your survey, think about what options will best suit your purpose. I’m going to make this question mandatory, and my order choices randomized.
When you have your question ready to save, click on “done.” Now I’m ready to add my second question.
The next tab is “survey settings” where we can customize the look.
Use the scroll bar to see what options are available. Remember: your choice should be consistent to the look and feel of the site. Don’t choose a look that creates an unwanted connotation (so avoid the skull and crossbones option) and the sunset option is a little too beachy for our site.
The standard option we use is “plain black.” If you have a question, check with an editor.
We will also select the size the poll will appear on the site. Our option are narrow, medium and wide. As I said before, we normally use narrow for polls since they are so short.
FYI, if you scroll down, poll daddy gives you a preview.
Once you’re happy with how your poll looks, click the “save style settings”
Our third step is to choose the sharing options.
The default tab is Javascript, which we use most often. Other options are specific to WordPress or allows us to create a direct link to the poll. Choose this option only if you want to allow readers to leave comments. Most of the time we want to put the survey directly in front of our audience. This increases the chances they will use the content we’ve created.
In JavaScript, we have another choice: inline or slider popup. Because we’ll post multiple surveys on the site, you want to choose the inline option.
Now it’s just a matter of copying the HTML code that appears in the window and pasting it into the HTML window of the site. For this video, I’m pasting it into my blog so we can see exactly how it looks and make sure we’re happy with it. If you need to change anything, you can always go back into poll daddy, edit the survey and recopy the code.
So here is the survey we just created, and I’m happy with how that looks.
That’s all for this Camtasia video. Thanks for watching!
