To Publish a survey means to make it available to Illume‘s collector service, which will make the survey available to participants or interviewers for data collection. A survey must be approved before it can be published (see Approving a Survey). Administrators, Reviewers and Power Users may approve a survey.
To preview a survey to see how it looks and to test its validation features, use the Survey Previewer. With the Survey Previewer it is possible to take the entire survey without having to make the survey available to participants. Surveys may also be Test Published to produce a link that can be distributed to testers, with the data from the survey stored in an entirely separate table from the Published survey. See the Test Publish section of online help for more information on that topic.
To publish a survey, follow these steps:
- Click the Survey Administration tab of the Illume Survey Manager.
- If the survey does not appear in the list of surveys under Search Results, click on the Survey Search tab.
- Click Clear All Search Criteria, then click Search. This will display a list of all available surveys.
- Right click on the name of the survey and choose Approve and Publish from the context menu.
- (Optional) Add comments. These comments become part of the survey history.
- A time period must be supplied for publication. A time period is usually a short code to represent the period during which a survey is given. For example, if a survey is administered every quarter, assign the time periods “2004_Q1,” “2004_Q2,” etc. If the survey will be given only once, assign a simple period code like “1.” See Understanding Time Periods for more about time periods.
- An Email Job Resend Warning will appear. This warning applies to surveys that are launched over multiple time periods that have associated email jobs. If a survey is launched at time period 1 and has a running email job associated to it, and that survey is published again under a new time period without the email job being terminated, the participants on the list associated to the email job will be emailed again. Thus, before a survey is published under a new time period, any running email jobs associated to that survey should be terminated.
- Click OK.
The Survey will now have a Status of Running. Once a survey has been published, it is ready for participants or interviewers to begin submitting responses.