Text Surveys can be a great way to check in with your congregation, capture feedback fresh off an event, or gather data on different outreaches and initiatives. Here are five helpful tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way that will help you boost your effectiveness and take advantage of Gloo Surveys.

The best way to set up a Survey is to think through the metrics, aka the data points you want to capture, first - that’s why they’re typed in before the questions are added.

Let’s say, for example, you just finished an Evangelism Week where people were challenged to share the gospel with others, and now you want to capture statistics from that week using a survey. Maybe you want to know how many times a spiritual conversation was initiated, how many times the gospel was shared, and how many people accepted Christ. Well, those are your 3 metrics!

Now, with those in mind, you can design your survey questions to match those metrics:

Important: If you are slowly designing a survey, that’s fine! But in order to make sure your survey saves correctly, you must have questions and metrics created and associated with each other. Otherwise Gloo considers it an incomplete entry and will not save any piece of what you’ve set up.

If you want to maximize the number of people who participate in and finish your survey, keep it simple! You’ll notice in the survey above, all we asked of people was to input 3 numbers in response to 3 questions - short and sweet! We recommend asking no more than 5 questions in a Survey to prevent as much drop off as possible.

Using mostly numeric responses is also usually a good idea. Then, if you need a result that isn’t numeric, you could add a more text-based question to the end like “Which one of our gospel tools did you find most useful in your conversations?”

You can also use your ending response as an optional last way for people to give more feedback. Maybe you’re interested in more than just the numbers of your evangelism stats! Include an ask for people to use Gloo’s Stories feature to capture more personal accounts of how God worked during your evangelism week.

After you capture all of this useful data from people, obviously you’ll want to spend some time looking at the results and learning from them! If your survey has a lot of text (non-numeric) answers, then it’s easy to export the results into a spreadsheet where you can view everything together.

If your survey has more numeric answers, then Gloo is set up to give you an easy look at the results. For example, in our evangelism week survey from above, once people have submitted their answers we can easily see how many people answered each question (Total People), as well as totals and averages per person for each of our metrics.

You can set up both Opt-in Surveys and Scheduled Surveys. Knowing when to use which type is a good idea!

Opt-in Surveys are great for catching data and feedback on the fly, and they give people the ability to choose whether or not they want to participate. You could use these surveys to do spiritual health check-ins live during your Sunday service, or as a way to gather feedback at the end of an event. The key is that people are able to choose whether or not they want to participate by choosing whether or not to text in the keyword.

Scheduled Surveys are great for more formal types of feedback. Rather than individuals texting in the keyword to opt into the survey, one of your Team Members simply sends it out to a group. These can be a great way to gather feedback from your staff team or congregation, like an end of the year assessment of how things have been going, or measuring average attendance at church/small groups throughout the year.

Note: Since Scheduled Surveys are unprompted, we recommend using them sparingly if they are going to a large population (maybe once or twice a year to your entire congregation, for example). If you decide to use a recurring Scheduled Survey, be very selective on who's included to prevent opt outs (maybe just your staff team or small group leaders, for example). Also, since people don’t opt into Scheduled Surveys, it can be a good idea to let them know it’s coming beforehand so they aren’t confused when they receive a text survey they didn’t specifically sign up for.

If you want to make sure people will have a good experience filling out your survey, test it out in the Texting Simulator! For an Opt-In Survey, all you have to do is enter the keyword into the simulator in order to go through the survey.

If you want to test out a Scheduled Survey that doesn’t use a keyword, then Gloo will automatically generate a test keyword for you that can only be used in the simulator.