Surveys

A survey is a short questionnaire your board sends to its members: an annual board self-assessment, an evaluation of a committee or an officer, or an informal "what does everyone think?" poll. You build the questions, send it to the whole board or to one committee, and read the results in one place.

Surveys live under Surveys in the navigation, for every member. What you see there depends on your role:

• If your role can manage surveys, you see the full list — drafts, who has responded, and the results — with New survey to build one.

• Otherwise you land on your own surveys, in two tabs:

  • Awaiting your response — exactly the ones sent to you that you haven't answered yet, each with its deadline.
  • History — every survey you've completed (with the date you completed it), plus any you missed: whose deadline passed, or that closed, before you answered. A survey never simply disappears the moment you answer it or the moment its deadline passes — it moves from Awaiting to History instead, and stays there.

  You never see a draft, another member's response, a completion list, or any of the manage/distribute/close/reopen/delete controls — a self-assessment's results are confidential to whoever commissioned it, and nothing about that changes here.

Every board member can answer a survey they were sent — from the link in their email, from Surveys in the navigation, or from the Overview page's Surveys awaiting your response section — with no special permission required. Losing the email is no longer a dead end.

Reviewing what you already answered

Once you've responded, opening the survey again (from Surveys, or from its row in your History tab) shows "You've already responded" — and, for an attributed survey, your own submitted answers, read-only, right below it. For an anonymous survey there is no answer view at all, on purpose: an anonymous response is stored with no link back to who gave it, so there is nothing to look up for anyone — not the board, and not even you. Either way, nobody else's answers, and no list of who else has responded, ever appears on this page.

Your answers stay readable after the survey closes. Closing a survey — or its deadline passing — stops new responses; it doesn't take away your own record of what you said. View your answers on any completed row of your History tab keeps working for as long as the survey exists, and the page tells you the survey is no longer accepting responses rather than offering you a form you can't submit. What you see is a read-only copy of your submission, with the date you submitted it — there is no way to change an answer after the fact, on an open survey or a closed one.

This changes nothing about anonymity. Your answers are looked up only on an attributed survey; on an anonymous one nothing is looked up at all, whether it is open or closed, because there is no record connecting your name to your answers to look up in the first place.

Finding a survey once you have a lot of them

The Surveys list shows every survey the board has ever run — but only one page of them at a time, so it stays fast even after years of quarterly self-assessments. Type a term into the search box to match against a survey's title, and narrow the list with Status — All statuses (the default), Draft, Open, or Closed — to jump straight to the one that's actually collecting responses.

Select Apply to run the search and filter (they also apply automatically a moment after you change a control), and Clear filters to return to the whole list. Both live in the page's web address, so a filtered view is something you can bookmark or paste into an email — the person you send it to sees the same list. Once more surveys match than fit on one page, Previous page/Next page links appear below the list, and your active search and filter carry over as you page through — searching, filtering and paging all happen on the server, and it all keeps working with JavaScript turned off.

If nothing matches, the page says No matching surveys (as opposed to No surveys yet, which means the board hasn't created one at all) and offers a link to clear your filters.

What kinds of questions can I ask?

Four kinds, and you can mix them freely in one survey:

• Rating scale — a number between a bottom and a top you choose (1–5 by default). Good for "How well does the board hold management accountable?".
• Single choice — pick exactly one of the options you list.
• Multiple choice — pick any number of the options you list.
• Free text — a written answer, for the comments that matter most.

Each question can be required or optional. A required question has to be answered before a response can be submitted. If you submit with one or more required questions still blank, the form doesn't just say "answer every required question" and leave you to hunt for which one — it marks each unanswered required question right where it is and moves you straight to the first one, so you can fix it and resubmit without re-reading the whole survey. Nothing you already answered is lost when this happens.

Anonymous or attributed — choose once, carefully

Every survey is created in one of two modes, and the mode can never be changed afterwards:

• Anonymous — answers are stored with no link to the person who gave them. Not hidden from the screen: genuinely unattributed. The board can see that you responded, but never what you answered.
• Attributed — your name is recorded alongside your answers, and administrators can see who said what.

Board self-assessment is honest only when members believe it is confidential, so "anonymous" here is a property of how the data is stored, not a setting on a report. Respondents are told which mode they are in — in the invitation email and again at the top of the response form — before they answer.

The mode is locked once the survey has any response at all. Switching it would either expose people who were promised confidentiality or destroy answers already given, so BoardTools refuses either way round.

How do I create a survey?

Open Surveys and choose New survey. You'll set:

• A title and, optionally, a description respondents see above the questions.
• Anonymity — anonymous or attributed. There is no default; you have to choose, because you can't change it later.
• The audience — the whole board, or one committee's members.
• An optional response deadline.
• The questions, added one at a time, each with its type.

Saving creates the survey as a draft. A draft is invisible to members: nothing is sent and nobody can answer until you distribute it.

How do I send it out?

Open the survey and choose Distribute. That does three things at once:

1. Moves the survey from Draft to Open, so it starts accepting responses.
2. Emails every member of its audience their own personal response link.
3. Notifies each of them in the app, too — a bell notification and its own email, both pointing to the survey's respond page. Losing or deleting the first email is no longer the end of the road: the survey stays reachable from Surveys in the navigation and from the Overview page until it's answered, closed, or its deadline passes.

Each personal link is single-use — it works once, for one member, and it expires after 30 days. Forwarding it doesn't share the survey; it gives your link away. A member who prefers to answer while signed in can do so from the app at any time instead; either way they answer once. The in-app notice respects each member's own notification preferences (Notifications → Preferences, under Surveys); the personal email link does not, because it's a direct ask for that member's answer, not a digest they can opt out of.

Distributing again reaches anyone in the audience who hasn't been sent a response link yet — someone newly added to the audience since you last sent it, for instance. It does not re-mail someone who was already invited, even if they haven't answered — so it's not the way to chase the people your completion list shows as outstanding. For that, use Send a reminder (see "Who has responded" below).

Finding a survey's deadline without opening it

Every survey card on the Surveys list shows its response deadline, if it has one — the date, plus a relative hint like "in 3 days" or "3 days ago" so you don't have to do the math yourself. A survey that's still open but whose deadline has already passed is marked Deadline passed right on the list, so you can spot it without opening every card to check.

Who created it, and when it opened and closed

Every survey's page shows its own record of provenance, right under the status badges: Created by, Opened, and Closed — in your board's own time zone, the same way every other governance timestamp in BoardTools is shown. Six months from now, when a result is being cited in a decision, this is the answer to "who put this to the board, and what window was it open" — it's sitting on the page, not buried in the export.

Each of the three fills in honestly rather than showing a blank:

• Created by shows the name of whoever built the survey. If that member has since left the board, it says Former member rather than a name that no longer means anything; if the survey predates BoardTools recording a creator at all, it says Not recorded.
• Opened shows the moment the survey was first distributed. A draft that hasn't been sent yet shows Not yet opened — there's no window to report until there's a window.
• Closed shows the moment responses stopped being accepted. A survey that is still open shows Still open rather than an empty field, since it hasn't closed yet — knowing there is no close date yet is exactly what determines whether a given member still has time to respond.

This is a read-only record of the survey itself. It says nothing about who answered it — that's the completion list below, which stays exactly as anonymous or attributed as the survey's own mode always made it.

Who has responded — without breaking anonymity

The survey's page shows a completion list: every member of its audience, whether they've responded yet, and — once they have — the date they responded. This works exactly the same on an anonymous survey, because "who has responded" is recorded separately from "what they answered" — the two are never joined. So you can see the four people who haven't answered without learning anything about the eleven who have, and the date shown is deliberately just a date, never a time of day, on any survey: knowing the exact minute someone responded is never something this page reveals.

While the survey is open and at least one person hasn't responded yet, the page also offers Send a reminder: it emails, and notifies in the app, every member who hasn't responded — and only them. Members who have already responded are never contacted, on any survey, including an anonymous one — the same "who responded" record that lets the completion list stay anonymous is what this reads too. The confirmation tells you how many members it will reach before you send it, and the result tells you how many were actually reminded — if you send it again the same day, it says so and reminds nobody a second time, since everyone still outstanding was already told; try again the next day to reach them again.

Reading the results

The survey's page reports each question:

• Rating scales show how many people chose each point, plus the average.
• Choice questions show a count for every option you offered — including the ones nobody picked.
• Free-text questions list the answers as written, never attributed to anyone.

Why results are sometimes hidden

For an anonymous survey, results stay hidden until at least three people have responded. With two responses, anyone who remembers their own answer can work out the other person's by subtraction — so a small-n result isn't anonymous at all, whatever the screen says. The page tells you how many responses it has and how many it needs.

This threshold is fixed. It isn't a setting, and it can't be lowered by whoever wants to read the answers — that's the point.

Attributed surveys have no threshold: their answers are attributable by design and every respondent was told so before answering.

Getting the results into the board packet

Choose Export CSV on the survey's page to download exactly what you see on screen — every rating distribution, choice tally, and free-text answer — as a spreadsheet file you can drop into the board packet or hand to the governance committee. A suppressed survey (see above) exports as suppressed too: the file names the response count and the threshold, never the hidden answers, so there is no way around the anonymity guard by exporting instead of reading the page. Every export re-reads the results fresh at the moment you click, and only someone who can manage surveys can run it.

How do I extend the deadline or stop early?

Both controls are on the survey's page while it's open:

• Extend deadline — set a new, later date and time. The new deadline has to be in the future.
• Close now — stop accepting responses immediately, without waiting for the deadline. Outstanding email links stop working at once, and the results you have stay exactly as they are.

The deadline shown on the survey's page, and the date and time you pick when extending it, are both in your board's own time zone, with the zone named — the same zone your meetings are scheduled in (Settings → Board profile).

Closing is not deleting: a closed survey keeps its questions, its responses, and its report — and everyone who answered it keeps being able to read their own answers back from their History tab. What closing removes is the ability to add a response: the Answer this survey yourself link disappears from the survey's page once it is closed or its deadline has passed, rather than offering a form the survey would refuse.

Closing is reversible — reopening a survey

Close now is not permanent. A closed survey's page offers a Reopen control in its place. Reopening:

• Puts the survey back to Open, so it accepts responses again — including from anyone who hadn't answered yet.
• Keeps every response already submitted; nothing already answered is affected, and it's still counted in the results.
• Does not re-mail anyone by itself. The single-use email links that were working before you closed the survey stop working when you close it and stay stopped after you reopen it — a member with the app open can answer right away, but to reach anyone by email again after reopening, use Send a reminder to chase whoever still hasn't answered, or Resend links if the audience itself has changed since the last distribution.

If you closed a survey by mistake, or decide the board should keep answering past the point you stopped it, Reopen is the way back — no need to delete the survey and start over.

Can I edit a survey after sending it?

Open the survey and choose Edit. You can always fix the title and description — before or after distributing, even on a closed survey — because renaming a survey doesn't change what anyone already answered.

Questions are different: you can add, remove, or reword them for as long as the survey has zero responses, whether it's still a draft or has already been distributed and nobody has answered yet. The moment the first response comes in, the questions lock — editing one afterwards would retroactively change what that respondent already told the board, which is exactly the dishonesty this rule exists to prevent. If you need to change the questions after someone has answered, close that survey and run a new one instead. When questions are locked, the Edit page says so and shows them read-only rather than just hiding the controls.

The anonymity mode can never be changed, on any survey, at any time — see "Anonymous or attributed — choose once, carefully" above.

What gets recorded in the audit trail?

Creating, distributing, updating, closing, reopening, and deleting a survey all appear in the board's audit log, along with the anonymity mode that was in force. Responses are recorded too — but for an anonymous survey the audit entry deliberately does not name the respondent, for the same reason the answers don't. Sending a reminder is logged too, one entry per member reminded, naming who sent it and who was reminded — never who has or hasn't responded beyond that. Exporting the results (see "Getting the results into the board packet" above) is logged too, whether or not the export came back suppressed.

Deleting a survey

Deleting a survey removes it along with every response, answer, and completion record it holds. For an anonymous survey that is the only way its answers ever leave the board, and it takes all of them at once — there's no way to remove one person's answers, because no record says which are theirs.