Pre-populate choices for respondents

Let's say you are creating a customer satisfaction survey. You have a location drop down for respondents to choose their location but for some respondents you may already know their location and you want to save them the trouble of picking their location from a list.

Using SurveyTown you can pre-select an answer to a question using URL variables. The way it works is that you add the choice you want pre-selected to the URL. Here's an example.

https://s.surveytown.com/survey/?c=200011&id=89&question[288][540]=1

This example will preselect choice "540" from question "288". Question 288 is a question about a person's location and choice 540 is the location "Durham" in this particular survey.

If a respondent goes to that link they will see "Durham" pre-selected.

You can also use this feature to pre-fill text, multiple choice, add to sum, ranker and matrix questions. The format examples are here.

Question Type	Structure	Example
singleText	question[{QuestionID}]=string	question[13]=steve
multiText	question[{QuestionID}]=string	question[13]=steve
singleChoice	question[{QuestionID}][{ChoiceID}]=bool	question[16][44]=1
multiChoice	question[{QuestionID}][{ChoiceID}]=bool	question[16][44]=1
addSum	question[{QuestionID}][{ChoiceID}]=int	question[18][59]=20
ranker	question[{QuestionID}][{ChoiceID}]=int	question[18][59]=2
matrix	question[{QuestionID}][{RowID}][{ChoiceID}]=bool	question[17][5][54]=1

How do you find out the Question ID and Choice IDs? There are two ways. One is to view source on the active survey. In the form details you will see the Question ID and Choice ID.

View source

Retrieve via API

You can also retrieve the Question IDs and Choice IDs via the API using

Survey_Get_Questions
http://surveytown.com/api/survey_get_questions/

OR

Survey_Get_Info
http://surveytown.com/api/survey_get_info/

Pre-selecting choices can make taking a survey easier and more enjoyable for you respondents and give you more accurate information.

Happy surveying!