Do us all an additional favor on top of this piece: send it to their customer service people as a bug report because it sounds like this feature is not ready for prime time. Substack has a bad habit of releasing features with a lot of bugs or poorly designed and that seems to be getting worse.
Thank you for testing, summarising and reporting this to us, Karen. Clear and concise as always, and much appreciated.
I wanted your opinion and thoughts before getting detailed reader feedback. I'm going to wait a while. Based on your article, the survey isn't quite a poll but isn't fully geared & powered as a readership 'back-office' feedback survey yet.
I wanted to get a simple baseline read and repeat at specific times to see the impact of changes I make to my website/style.
For me, the lack of anonymity outweighs all other issues.
Wowzers, Karen - thank you for such a thorough investigation into this new feature. It is most helpful. Seems like surveys are mostly helpful "for fun" now, but not for deep dive analysis of reader opinions.
I found it super easy to set up and to add the button to the survey. However, I love polls better because there's less friction. You can take part without clicking a button.
I see a lot of substackers doing POLLS. They are NOT new ^^ but of course, also a way to find out more about your audience.
Let's see how tech works on my end. Didn't experience any bugs. If so I'll document it and share it with you.
Greetings to Down Under. Hopefully, you'll find some time to meet me inside our school to discuss our Medium idea and other projects.
This is very helpful - and I agree it's not a good as it could be (and inferior to basic Google Forms capabilities).
I incorporated a survey for the first time this week and was disappointed to see that there is not a question format to easily enable people to rate a series of items on a 1-5 scale without tediously making each one a separate question.
I had read your first part but not this second part until after I already posted my survey.
One thought (as I was looking for this answer and surprised to see it on the cons list) was the anonymity - I'm actually about to send a survey where I need to know who responds as it informs my next actions (upgrading their subscriber status). I hope they don't make it so all responses are anonymous moving forward, but that (at the least) you can choose to toggle this feature. It increases functionality / info analysis of the survey on my end to be able to see who is responding (in certain instances). It's a bit obnoxious that it's hidden info until you export.
Hmm yes, it's certainly valuable to have responders' identity for surveys, my concern with this aspect is that on first glance the surveys feature initially appears to be anonymous, but collects data in a non-transparent way.
If I was using responder-identifying information, as you will be to upgrade subscriptions, I would let responders know the survey is not anonymous.
As well as being more ethical, it would also be a legal requirement to do that in some parts of the world.
Definitely seems the solution is transparency? Just letting survey participants know if it is truly anonymous, if they can opt out, and if we can set the anonymity level. Simple fixes?
Do us all an additional favor on top of this piece: send it to their customer service people as a bug report because it sounds like this feature is not ready for prime time. Substack has a bad habit of releasing features with a lot of bugs or poorly designed and that seems to be getting worse.
Thank you for testing, summarising and reporting this to us, Karen. Clear and concise as always, and much appreciated.
I wanted your opinion and thoughts before getting detailed reader feedback. I'm going to wait a while. Based on your article, the survey isn't quite a poll but isn't fully geared & powered as a readership 'back-office' feedback survey yet.
I wanted to get a simple baseline read and repeat at specific times to see the impact of changes I make to my website/style.
For me, the lack of anonymity outweighs all other issues.
Hi Karen, this is so useful, as always. Many thanks!
This is great, Karen, as always. I so appreciate you sharing all this knowledge with us. I will try a survey in my next post.
Wowzers, Karen - thank you for such a thorough investigation into this new feature. It is most helpful. Seems like surveys are mostly helpful "for fun" now, but not for deep dive analysis of reader opinions.
Hi Karen, for a story I'm writing and a video I also gave it a shot (only for subscribers): https://kristinagod.substack.com/p/i-hit-4000-subscribers-and-now-i
I found it super easy to set up and to add the button to the survey. However, I love polls better because there's less friction. You can take part without clicking a button.
I see a lot of substackers doing POLLS. They are NOT new ^^ but of course, also a way to find out more about your audience.
Let's see how tech works on my end. Didn't experience any bugs. If so I'll document it and share it with you.
Greetings to Down Under. Hopefully, you'll find some time to meet me inside our school to discuss our Medium idea and other projects.
Hugs!
Kristina
This was great. Saved me a headache - not using it yet. Hopefully updates come soon.
This is very helpful - and I agree it's not a good as it could be (and inferior to basic Google Forms capabilities).
I incorporated a survey for the first time this week and was disappointed to see that there is not a question format to easily enable people to rate a series of items on a 1-5 scale without tediously making each one a separate question.
I had read your first part but not this second part until after I already posted my survey.
One thought (as I was looking for this answer and surprised to see it on the cons list) was the anonymity - I'm actually about to send a survey where I need to know who responds as it informs my next actions (upgrading their subscriber status). I hope they don't make it so all responses are anonymous moving forward, but that (at the least) you can choose to toggle this feature. It increases functionality / info analysis of the survey on my end to be able to see who is responding (in certain instances). It's a bit obnoxious that it's hidden info until you export.
Hmm yes, it's certainly valuable to have responders' identity for surveys, my concern with this aspect is that on first glance the surveys feature initially appears to be anonymous, but collects data in a non-transparent way.
If I was using responder-identifying information, as you will be to upgrade subscriptions, I would let responders know the survey is not anonymous.
As well as being more ethical, it would also be a legal requirement to do that in some parts of the world.
Definitely seems the solution is transparency? Just letting survey participants know if it is truly anonymous, if they can opt out, and if we can set the anonymity level. Simple fixes?
Yes I think letting potential respondents know about the lack of anonymity is the best fix.