Use Question Piping to Customize Questions, Messages

by Krista Stevens | August 23rd 2011

At Polldaddy, we’re constantly improving our application. The latest survey feature offers a great way for you to customize start and finish messages and get more detailed information by placing answers into future questions. Here’s what you need to know about question piping to customize your surveys. Note that question piping is a feature for paid account holders only.

Customizing questions with previous answers

Let’s say we’re running a pie shop. We want to know which type of pies our customers love most and why. This way, we can better plan inventory and make sure we’ve got plenty of fresh pies on hand each day. We’ve added a question to collect each participant’s name and created a multiple choice question (question two) which asks participants to select their favorite pie. Note that Gus selected Pumpkin as his favorite type of pie:

On question three, we want to know why Gus likes the type of pie he chose. We can pipe his answer from question two, into question three, to learn more:

Note that to work as expected, the piped questions must be on separate pages:

Now the answer that Gus supplies in question two, will automatically be piped into the question text for question three:

Customize finish messages

Here’s how to use question piping to customize a survey’s finish message. Note that custom finish messages are available to paid customer accounts only. As the first question in our survey, we’ve asked for the participant’s name:

We’ll set up question piping to include the participant’s first name in the custom finish message to personally thank them for completing our survey. Note that we’ve added [Q1 first_name] to our custom finish message text. This pulls the answer the participant provided in the first name field of question one, and places it into the custom finish message. If you like, you can add the last name, too, using the following: [Q1 first_name last_name].