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A primer on engagement formats

PublicInput offers a wide array of engagement formats and question types, designed to be flexible and useful for your specific outreach.

Jay Dawkins avatar
Written by Jay Dawkins
Updated over a week ago

Quantitative Questions

Select One Option (buttons)
The participant can click once to respond by selecting one of several items. These can be images, words or a combination of both.

Select One Option (dropdown)
Similar to above, this format works well when you have a longer list of items to select from (we recommend this for any list greater than 8 items).

Select Multiple-Answer (buttons)
This format is similar to single-answer, but allows the participant to choose multiple items. Dropdown format is available, but not encouraged as this will lean on native browser formats that may not be clear to all participants.

Correct Answer
This is a single-answer question with a pre-defined correct answer.

Rank Options
Participants are asked to rank-order their top priorities or values. Very useful when comparing among tradeoffs or dealing with scarcity of potential outcomes.

Matrix Questions
A set of questions with the same answers, often a scale. This format is great for comparing related items. Results are displayed inline to provide a quick way to compare sentiment on each item.

Slider
Pick between two options, or poles.

Notes & Tips:

  • You can enable comments on all quantitative questions (optional.)

  • All quantitative questions show results immediately after participation. You can opt to disable live results or "vote counts" (toggled on by default for all questions) if you want to hide the results from the public until the project closes.

Consensus
This is a newer question format designed to facilitate crowdsourced ideation and crowd review of crowd-submitted ideas.

Learn how to create your own here:
How to create a consensus question

Participant Location

"AirBnB" style general location
In this format, participants can drag a circle on a map to indicate their general location (less specific than address). The center of this circle will populate on participation maps.

Zip Code
Option A - Location Question:
Using the standard location question, ask participants to provide their zip code. When they submit a response, their location is set to the center of the zip code. Their zip code will be stored in your CRM and its lat/long will populate on participation map.

Option B - Contact Info Question:
Create a collect contact info question and select zip code as a field to collect. The zip code's center will be converted to lat/long for populating participant maps and the address will be stored in your CRM.

Address
Option A - Location Question:
Using the standard location question, ask participants to provide their address. When they submit a response, their location is set to this address. The address will be stored in your CRM and its lat/long will populate on participation map.

Option B - Contact Info Question:
Create a collect contact info question and select address as a field to collect. These will be converted to lat/long for populating participant maps and the address will be stored in your CRM.

Qualitative Questions

Comment participation
Public
If public, participants can engage with each other and staff can reply to comments as the agency. All comments are moderated for profanity, and participants can flag inappropriate comments. Anytime a comment is hidden for profanity reasons or flagged by a participant, admins will receive an email notification to review the comment.

Public with Toxicity Monitoring
 if you have the premium 'Toxicity' tools enabled, the system will analyze language for patterns matching comments that have been flagged as toxic to civil dialog. This tool also provides real-time feedback to the user, such as "Please remember to keep comments civil and respectful".

Private
When public comments are disabled, the private comment box operates similar to a standard survey form field. All responses are stored instantly and the participant can see their past response.

Participant Information

Common fields:
Email
Phone
Address
Zip code
Name
First Name
Last Name

All fields collected using this format synchronize to your resident CRM, and geographic fields like address and zip code are automatically triangulated to Lat/Long for mapping purposes.

Geospatial

Map Response
Participants place pins and (optionally) lines on a map and can add comments to the map. Many options are available to add existing map data layers, and constrain input to specific areas or shapes.

Image Shape Selection
With this format, you can upload an image for participants to view and click a shape within the image.

Map Shape Selection
Select shapes you draw or add with kml or kmz files on a google map.


Demographic Questions

Demographic categories connected to Census Data. You can add individual pre-determined Demographic Questions, or add the Demographic Module, which houses all 5 demographic questions, and can be edited to hold your organization's preferred demographic questions, making the questions more inclusive than the default Census questions.

Special Question Types

Skip logic
Skips participants to a specific question - ideal for multi-step Content + Question surveys or SMS (Question Series) surveys.

Confirmation
Used primarily for SMS surveys, this is helpful as a final message to send after a participant finishes the survey.

Data Lookup
This format is designed to provide instant information to participants based on an input like address, zip code, school district, or other pertinent piece of information. Look for a walkthrough article on this soon.

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