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to view a survey found in a conference records.Original publication date: March, 2008
With the relatively recent introduction of the Survey Responses form, Softshare is wondering if the old way of creating and tracking conference surveys could be improved. We’d like your input. But first, a little background on each survey method.
Long before we introduced the Survey Responses form to WebCATS—long before WebCATS even—Softshare has provided the ability to create and store conference surveys in conference records. These surveys are structured according to a rating scale. For example, questions must be posed so that an attendee can respond with agree, strongly agree, strongly disagree, etc. or with average, good, excellent, etc.
These surveys are quite labor intensive. They need to be printed, distributed at the conference for attendees to complete, and collected again. Their results are then manually tallied and entered into the conference record as aggregate totals.
Click here to view a survey found in a conference records.
Survey response records have quite a bit more flexibility than conference surveys. They’re not limited to a static rating scale (their responses can range from dates, yes/no answers, numbers, plain text fields, and even picklist choices). Even more convenient is that, for eCenter users, these survey record types can be posted to eCenter and filled out online by the attendees, completely eliminating the need for you to manually tally and enter their results into WebCATS. One more advantage is that survey response records are tied back to client records, for one-to-one reconciliation.
But this survey type also has limitations. Currently, these surveys cannot be associated with conference records and there can only be one survey active at any given moment per center.
Click here.gif)
to view a survey response record.
But what if we could combine these two survey types into one super survey? These surveys would be directly linked to conference records, conference attendees could fill out surveys that pose any question imaginable (either online at eCenter or manually at the conference), and responses could be stored on a per-attendee basis.
This all sounds really great, so why do we need your input? Because there are some drawbacks. If we removed the conference survey feature found within conference records, you would no longer be able to able to manually enter that 5 attendees thought organization was excellent and 4 thought it was very good, and so on. Instead, WebCATS would calculate survey results for you by combining all the individual survey response records. So ultimately, unless you had eCenter, you’d be manually creating a survey response record for every attendee, rather than one record for the entire conference.
The other drawback is that, if we removed the conference survey feature from conference records, any survey results currently stored in your conference records would be lost. Softshare, unfortunately, has no way to retain them.
So what do you think? Our proposed method requires more data entry for the non-eCenter user; but, on the flip side, the survey results are more accurate and more meaningful. If you have an opinion, we really want to hear it!