Despite the proliferation of digital ways to engage people, sometimes paper surveys can still be a great route for data collection.

This article covers two topics:

1. Printing a survey and

2. Manually entering responses received via Data Entry Mode

Printing your survey

To print a survey, open the admin page for your project or survey and navigate to the Meetings and Offline tab:

From there, scroll down to the Printable Survey button under Data Entry to open the printable survey page.

On the printable page, you can click anywhere on the page to modify and remove text. Once you're happy with the format, print the page using your browser's default print function. On most browsers this is under the File > Print menu.

Entering Data received offline

Data entry is the only way to enter participant contact information and responses received offline. Entering data on the live site will tie information to the administrator's CRM profile.

To get to the data entry interface, open the admin page for your project or survey and navigate to the Meetings and Offline tab:

From there, click the New Data Entry Record button at the bottom of the meetings tab.

You will see a new window open, with a bright 'Data Entry Mode' header at the top of the browser:

To begin entering data, enter any contact information for your participant along with the source of the response from the 'Input Source' dropdown. If the response was not received on today's date, you can optionally include the date the response was received.

There are no required fields in data entry mode, however, it’s best practice to name the entry. For example, if you didn’t collect a name for the participant, or they wish to remain anonymous, you could name the entry “Participant 1” or “Entry 2,” and so on. (You can number the paper entries if the participant doesn't give their name.)
If you’re entering survey data from a spreadsheet (e.g. participants who called in to answer your survey over the phone,) it’s best that you name the data entry to match the spreadsheet row number. This way your spreadsheet and data records match, and you can easily find and edit a specific data entry later, if necessary.

If you'd like to add this participant to the default mailing list for this survey, leave the "Subscribe to email updates on this project" box checked.

When you click continue, you'll see the survey questions associated with this project:

Enter the responses you've received on the paper survey (or other input source) as though you were responding for this person. The system will associate these responses with the participant information you entered on the prior page.

To add comments, be sure to submit them individually by clicking the "Comment" button for each question you're entering data for.

As with comments, be sure to click Confirm Selections & View Results (or custom "submit" button text) to record responses to multiple answer questions. All other responses are saved automatically as you enter them.

Once you've finished entering the participant's response, click "Start a new entry" at the top of the page to return to the participant information page and begin a new entry.

Note:

You can still use Data Entry Mode to input data after a project has been archived.
When manually inputting paper survey responses with already filled IP address, keep in mind the IP address will change and connect to the IP from the data entry user once uploaded to the platform.