Preparation
A Survey is quick to set up once its surroundings are ready: a Team to run it, a Map to receive the sites and the Icons that describe them.
Team
Every Survey belongs to a team. The team’s members build the form, review the answers and decide what gets published. If you don’t have a team on the platform yet, create a team first.
Invite the people who will review answers before you launch, so the first contributions don’t wait for someone who can’t see them yet.
Map
Most Surveys put their answers on a map, and that map has to exist before you pick it in the Survey. If you skipped this step, see create your first map. The map must belong to the same team as the Survey.
The map also decides what contributors see after sending an answer. New sites are private until you publish them. If you set suggested sites as “pending” on the map instead, contributors see the site’s icon on the map right after they answer, but nobody can open it until your team has reviewed and published it.
A Survey can also run without a map, when you only want to collect answers and not place anything.
Icons
Icons tell what kind of place a site is, and the icons a Survey can offer come from the icon sets of its map. Green Map’s own award winning icons work out of the box, so this step is optional.
Icons can also bring their own questions, called attributes. When a contributor picks an icon, its questions appear in the form. For a Survey about old trees, a Special Tree icon could ask for the trunk diameter and the species, and those answers can be shown on the map and exported with your data.
Attributes take a little more work, because you need your own icon set to define them. They are worth it when every site of a kind should answer the same questions. Keep in mind that an icon question marked as required has to be answered before the form can be sent.
Who gets notified
Your team can get an email every time an answer arrives. It’s a switch in the settings of the Survey, called notifications. Check that it’s on, and decide who will watch the answers before you launch, so nothing sits unreviewed.