General

Yes – once the expiry date has passed you can no longer use your survey. While you will be able to collect results on your device (this cannot be automatically disabled) you will not be able to upload them to the Data4Action server.

For example, if you bought a survey to use for one month on 05 August then you will not be able to upload any more results to the Data4Action web site after midnight on 04 September has passed.

It is very important that you keep track of your expiry dates otherwise you could end up with survey results which you cannot use. Data4Action emails you warnings prior to your survey expiry.

No – you cannot re-activate expired surveys. However, it is possible to copy a survey which has expired and use that as the basis for your new survey which you can then purchase in the normal way.

Yes – if your survey is currently active then you can extend the time that it will stay active. See How to top up a purchased survey and extend your survey expiry date.

Data4Action keeps your survey results for 3 months after the expiry of your survey. We notify you well in advance that your data is about to expire. It is your responsibility to ensure that you download the data before deletion.

In survey Edit Mode you can add and delete questions and answers and modify the flow of the survey. This means that any results that you might have already gathered in Test Mode are no longer useful therefore Data4Action deletes test survey results when you switch into Edit Mode.

During the setup of a survey, it is possible to make quick and easy modifications by switching between Test Mode and Edit Mode.

After a survey has been published, it is no longer possible to edit your survey by switching survey modes. The reason that we lock down the survey after it has been published is that the survey on the device must match the survey in the Data4Action database in every way. If it does not match, the results will not map to the structure in the database and the results will be useless. The solution to this restriction is to duplicate your published survey, edit the duplicated survey and then republish it.

After editing and re-publishing, a survey, the results from your original survey and results from your re-published survey are stored in separate files in your Data4Action account. This means that you will have to download these files separately to obtain all the results for your project or campaign.

Tips

We recommend you test your survey on a physical device before publishing / purchasing a survey. If required use the Edit a Published / Purchased process sparingly to reduce the fragmentation of your survey results.

If an Internet connection is not available or if your Internet connection is broken, you can continue to collect survey results and the device will silently upload results automatically in the background the next time it can detect an Internet Connection.

Tips

If you have enabled Automatic Upload of Results, we recommend you double check that all your survey results have been successfully uploaded from your device at the end of your project. It is possible that some results may not have been uploaded because the device lost its Internet connection.
To verify that all survey results have been uploaded, open the Administration Menu on the device and check that all results have been uploaded. If survey results remain stored on the device, establish an Internet connection, and select the Upload Results button from the Administration Menu.

Survey Health includes calculators for working out your survey’s Confidence Interval (margin of error) for a given Confidence Level and Population size. View survey statistics including percentage of incomplete surveys and the average time a user takes to answer a question or survey.