Set Up An External Survey On SurveyMonkey
If you have properly set up your survey study on the Sona website, you can use these instructions to connect your Surveymonkey.com survey to Sona for automatic credit granting.
Introduction
The overview here is pretty simple -- you just set your survey to secretely call a special URL when the participant finishes their survey. That URL will connect briefly with Sona and give that participant credit for completing your study.
Unfortunately, this requires either a Surveymonkey gold ($300/year) or platinum ($780/year) subscription. Note that students get half off, so the gold subscription would be only $150/year for students. Without at least a gold subscription, you won't have access to the custom redirect feature required to link Surveymonkey to our Sona website.
Linking your Surveymonkey Survey to Sona
Step 1. First log in to your Surveymonkey account and click on the name of the survey you want to edit.
Step 2. Click on the COLLECT RESPONSES tab.
Step 3. Choose ONE of the collectors to link to Sona.
Note: Most of you will only have 1 collector anyway. I don't think it would be good to connect multiple connectors. If you feel that you must connect multiple collectors for a single survey, please consult with Ben Storm first to avoid unintended consequnces for the participants and for your allocation.
Step 4. Click on CHANGE SETTINGS.
Step 5. Edit the SURVEY COMPLETION option.
1. Find the SURVEY COMPLETION option and then
2. Choose REDIRECT TO YOUR OWN WEBPAGE.
3. Enter the completion URL from your study information overview page into the ENTER A URL box.
Important:
Sona will give you a completion URL something like this:
- https://ucsc.sona-systems.com/webstudy_credit.aspx?experiment_id=243&credit_token=66e315069f22450993651b60e3aaeaaf&survey_code=XXXX
The version you enter into the box for this step must be edited. Remove the last 7 characters, i.e., remove "&survey_code=XXXX" so that your new completion URL looks something like this:
- https://ucsc.sona-systems.com/webstudy_credit.aspx?experiment_id=243&credit_token=66e315069f22450993651b60e3aaeaaf
This is the version you enter into your surveymonkey SURVEY COMPLETION setup.
Step 6. Other Important Settings.
This has nothing to do with connecting Sona to Surveymonkey, but you should consider the following:
This page has a USE SSL ENCRYPTION option. You should set this to ENABLE SSL. This encrypts the questions and answers as they are sent over the internet from your participant to the Surveymonkey website. If you choose not to use this feature, then anyone with freely obtainable network monitoring software can read your participants data as it's sent over the internet. This is almost certainly a violation of your agreement with the IRB.
This page has a SAVE IP Address in the Results option. I recommend that you set this to NO. Be aware that the IP address uniquely identifies the computer used by the participant to complete your survey. This mean that it can be entered into one of hundreds of webpages that would return the identity of whomever pays for that internet connection (this is public information). In some cases this informaton can be used to uniquely identify your participant and links a person to their data. If your agreement with the IRB involves storing these these things separately, then you may want to disable saving the IP address. Surveymonkey is already making sure that only 1 person per IP address can take your survey (see the ALLOW MULTIPLE RESPONSES option). This feature won't be affected by whether or not your store the IP address in your data file.
Step 7. Save Settings
Press the SAVE SETTINGS button. You're done.
Now when someone completes your survey, they'll be redirected to the front page of our Sona website. However, behind the scenes, the website will be told to give this participant credit for your study. Don't forget to create a timeslot on Sona for your survey. Remember that you just need 1 timeslot with multiple hours assocated with it. Also don't forget that no one will see your study if you don't activate it.
If you have trouble, have questions, or have comments about this process or these instructions, please contact us at .
