Summary
Surveda is a tool for developing questionnaires, executing and monitoring multimodal surveys, and exporting the results. The Surveda tool consists of four primary components: projects, surveys, questionnaires, and channels. These are building blocks of the tool. This section describes these components and the relationships among them.
Project
The project is a place to create surveys and questionnaires. Creating a project is the first step you will take when designing a survey. The project itself is very basic, but it serves an important purpose to organize resources for running surveys.
As shown in Figure 1, a project can house multiple surveys and questionnaires. Once created, surveys and questionnaires are fixed in a particular project (i.e., they cannot be moved across projects).
You can share projects across multiple users. You can create as many projects as needed, but you should group similar surveys in the same project. For example, a Ministry of Health (MOH) may have a project on “Noncommunicable Diseases” with multiple surveys. That same MOH may have a project on “Health Promotion” with other surveys.
Note: The project name should be short and simple and something that conveys meaning. For example, “Noncommunicable Disease Survey” or “Family Planning Survey.”
Survey
A survey is a set of parameters for how to administer the questionnaire to respondents. These parameters include a list of telephone numbers to be dialed or contacted, the questionnaire, the supported modes, cutoff rules, and start and end information. You can create surveys by clicking on the “Add Survey” button within a project. In Surveda, you follow a step-by-step guide to design and run each survey.
For detailed information on creating a survey, see How to Configure, Monitor, and Run a Survey.
Figure 1: Surveda Components
Questionnaire
A questionnaire contains one or more questions that the respondent will answer. The questionnaire designer is intended to be simple and easy to use while also allowing for the flexibility to meet various requirements, such as skip logic, language translations, and mode support.
You can assign questionnaires to multiple surveys. In Figure 1, Project X has both Survey A and Survey B. Both of these surveys use Questionnaire C. This ability to reuse questionnaires helps ensure consistency in questionnaire design and may support efficiency across surveys.
While questionnaires can be shared within a project, you cannot share them across projects. For example, Questionnaire C in Project X cannot be used in a survey in Project Y. For more information on setting up and configuring project permissions, please see the Permissions Guideline document.
For a step-by-step guide on using the questionnaire designer, please see the How To: Designing Questionnaires.
Channel
A channel is the mechanism that Surveda uses to communicate with mobile network operators or aggregators. When you create the survey, you configure the survey channel in the Select Modes and Channels screen.
You must configure a channel for each mode supported in the survey. For example, if a survey is to support both SMS and phone calls (IVR), then you must create two channels, one for each mode. As illustrated in Figure 1, channels exist outside of the project domain, which means that a channel can be used across projects.
For more information on channels, please see Information: Channels: Channels.