Editing a Live Survey

Once you send a survey out to your respondents, that survey is considered Live. If you need to edit the survey after it goes live you can, but there are some risks involved so make sure you understand these before going ahead.

Editing the survey is done via all the same tools as creating it. Simply access the survey from the "My Surveys" list in the same way as editing it before it went live.

Risks of Editing a Live Survey

Once you change a live survey, the changes will be applied to responses that you have already received, as well as responses you receive after the edit.

SmartSurvey will not keep a record of the old question or answer wording, and will simply group all answers against the new answers

For example, you could ask someone whether they like to drink tea, coffee or hot chocolate. If you replace the answer ‘tea’ with ‘orange juice’ while the survey is live, all of the people who originally answered ‘tea’ will now be assigned to ‘orange juice’.

Changing the text of a question also causes similar problems with results. For example, changing the question from ‘What is your favourite drink?’ to ‘What do you drink in the morning?’ will invalidate the answers from any respondents who have already taken part.

Other Risks

Editing Page Structure and Skip Logic rules after a survey has gone live can cause issues for any respondents who are in the process of completing their response. For this reason, we encourage users to approach such changes with extreme caution. Be very careful indeed about making such changes, and check for partial responses before doing so.

Was this guide helpful?