Building the survey

Three ways to start

A new survey’s agenda opens with Let’s build your survey:

• Generate a survey with AI. Answer a few questions and Converge drafts the survey. This is the recommended path.
• Import a survey. Reuse one from your library or a previous survey.
• Start with an empty section and add your own questions.

You can mix them. Generate a draft and hand-edit it, or import last quarter’s survey and change two questions.

Generating a survey with AI

Click AI Guide on the agenda to open the AI Survey Builder. It starts with a brief:

• Research Goals. What you want to learn, and the topics or decisions the survey should inform. This is the part that matters most.
• Source Material. Optional. Up to three files, PDF, Word, or Markdown, 20 MB each. Choose Use as background to have the AI write a new survey informed by them, or Reproduce this questionnaire to convert an existing questionnaire as closely as possible. If a Word document has images that matter, upload a PDF version instead.
• Target completion time (min). Roughly how long one respondent should need. When you’re reproducing a questionnaire, the source questions are kept and this target doesn’t shorten them.
• Who will answer? A short description of your respondents.

Click Generate survey. It usually takes one to three minutes.

Reviewing the draft

The draft appears as a readable survey with a summary of how many questions and activities it has and an estimate such as “Approx. 8 min to complete”. The estimate is worked out from the questions and reading involved, so treat it as a guide.

Three tabs sit beside the draft:

• Refine. Ask for changes in plain language, or start from a suggestion: Shorten to five minutes, Check for leading questions, or Improve answer options. Edits become a working draft you save as a new version when you’re happy, and the arrows step between versions.
• Brief. The research goals and settings you gave, with Edit.
• Upload questionnaire. Upload a questionnaire file to reproduce its questions, answer choices, and structure as a new draft version.

Putting the draft on the agenda

The draft isn’t your survey yet. Click Program Survey to copy it into the agenda. That replaces any survey content already there, and it doesn’t change when the survey opens or closes.

From then on the Agenda is where you make edits. You can come back and Re-program Survey from another draft version, but that replaces the full survey again, including anything you changed by hand.

Caution

Re-programming replaces the whole survey, including activities that already have responses. Once a survey is collecting, edit it from the agenda instead.

Building by hand

A survey is made of sections, and each section holds activities, the same structure as any session guide. Respondents see one activity per page.

Add Section creates a section. Most surveys need only one. Inside it, Add Activity offers five types:

• Mini Survey. A question page: several related questions on one screen. Questions can be open ended, select, rate, rank, or allocate, with required flags and skip logic. This is where most of a survey lives.
• Rate. A set of items scored on one or more scales.
• Rank. A list to put in order.
• Select. A single or multiple choice from a list.
• Info. Text, images, or video with nothing to answer. Use it for an introduction, a concept to react to, or a thank-you at the end.

Every option on these is described in Activity types. Reordering, duplicating, and the Available switch work as described in Building the session guide.

Ideas brainstorms and Categorization aren’t available in a survey, because respondents don’t see each other’s answers. For written feedback, add an open-ended question to a question page.

Group related questions

Prefer a few question pages holding related questions over many pages with one question each. It reads better for respondents, and the count they see on the opening screen is of pages, not questions.

Importing a survey

Import Survey on the agenda opens a short wizard. Under Select survey, pick a Previous survey. If your company library or the Converge global library holds surveys, those appear as choices too. Preview survey shows what you’re about to bring in, and Import adds it to the agenda.

Surveys and facilitated sessions keep separate libraries, so the import list only offers surveys. Responses are never copied.

To save a survey for reuse, use Add to Library in the Export menu. Creating from that library entry later makes a new survey.

Asking the Survey Assistant to review it

The sparkle button opens the Survey Assistant. Before you share, choose Review survey questions. It reads the actual question wording and answer options, checks for unclear, leading, or double-barreled questions, missing choices, and repetition, and suggests the highest-impact fixes without changing anything. If you want a change made, ask for it.

Then preview the survey as a respondent before sending it out.