I am interested in starting a Snowball Survey. I will start by asking a couple of known people to participate in my survey, and those people then select the people in their network. The people that are selected are then sent the survey, and the network builds like a “snowball”.
Is this functionality available in Polinode?
Kenzie, we do support that functionality!
One of the first choices you have when creating a question in Polinode is which type of question you want to choose. For this functionality, you are going to want to choose either “Search and Select” or “Multiple Choice”. Then, you will want to ensure that you choose “Relationship Question”. Now skip ahead to the “Advanced Option” button, and enable “Input Additional Names”. With this option set to yes, your respondents will be able to add names to either the Respondent List or Supplementary List (more on this below).
Which brings us back to the “Source of Relationships” option. Here is where you choose the source of the data, and where the respondents answer will be uploaded. As noted above, this can either be the Respondent List, or the Supplementary list.
If you choose the Respondent List, any names and emails added will be added to the Respondent list (consuming a Respondent Credit as this person will then be added to your survey). If you choose the Supplementary List no respondent credit will be immediately used.
We suggest having the new additions added to the Supplementary List as you can pipe to a text question to retrieve the emails (if you want the “Snowball effect”) and then select which names and emails you would like to add to the survey. This adds a step for you, but allows you to avoid using Respondent Credits on mis-spellings of emails as well as controlling the overall size and scope of the survey.
Good luck on your Snowball Survey!
Is it possible when piping to a text question to retrieve the emails of individuals that the respondent has added to the supplementary list to only show those additional names and not all the names they selected.
Hi @Outhentics. So, you can’t pipe only the newly added names into a subsequent question but there are some options that may help you. Firstly, if what you are interested in is collecting emails for those individuals that are added you can use a respondent list rather than a supplementary list when setting up the question with the advanced option to input additional names. This will then automatically include a text input for the respondent to add the email address of the person they are adding to the list (i.e. an extra field alongside the name field).
The second option woudl be to break the question into two, i.e. to let them select from the existing list in a first question and then from a second list (including the names added by others) as a second question. You could then pipe only that second question to a subsequent question…of course it would include anyone that they select that has already been added by others so probably not ideal.
Thanks for that. In the case of option 1 will the new added respondents automatically get a copy of the survey if there are sufficient credits? Or if I set the credits just for initial tranche then when I have checked the new emails for spelling etc will they go when I buy sufficient extra credits?
No problem. They won’t automatically receive an invitation to take the survey. They will be added with the status of Not Sent so you can determine which of those respondents you want to subsequently send the survey to (by for example editing the status of those that you don’t want to include to say Opted Out). A respondent credit will be used though at the time that they are added by the respondent adding that name (i.e. not at the time that the survey is sent to them). If there aren’t sufficient credits at that time then the respondent won’t be able to add those additional names. If you want to save the credits an alternative would be to use a Supplementary List and pipe all the names to a subsequent question and then ask the respondents to just enter emails for those respondents that they added in the above question (but that would mean that they would have to remember which ones they added as new items).