User's Manual

Smart Survey Design
Page 26
V: COLLECTING DATA AND PRIVACY BEST PRACTICES
1. Inform your respondents about how their responses will be handled.
It is always good to disclose your privacy practices to your respondents. Doing this helps to
increase response rates by putting potential respondents more at ease. You can disclose
your privacy practices on the introduction page of your survey, or in the body of any email
message containing the link inviting recipients to take your survey. If you are conducting a
survey for an organization which already has its own privacy policy, you may wish to link to
it if it is relevant. Alternatively, you can just describe your privacy practices in full on the
introduction page of the survey itself.
Privacy statements should detail at least the following things:
 What personal information you are collecting: Identify whether you are collecting
the responses anonymously or tracking by email address, by ticket number, etc.).
Outline the types of personal information the survey asks for.
 How you plan to use the responses: Why are you conducting your survey? What
are you going to do with the survey results?
 Whether responses will be disclosed to anyone else: If you don‟t want anyone to
have access to your data, do not share your SurveyMonkey account with others and
ensure that your survey is configured such that survey results are not public.
 How respondents can access their responses: Can respondents access their
responses to correct their responses, or request that any personal information
collected about them be deleted?
 How respondents can contact you
You may also wish to link to SurveyMonkey‟s Privacy Policy and Security Statement to
disclose how we handle respondent data on your behalf.
2. Streamline the amount of personal information you collector.
Collect only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve your
purposes. Try to avoid asking for sensitive information in your surveys.
3. Use an encrypted survey link to distribute your survey.
We offer SSL encryption. This feature ensures that responses are communicated securely
to SurveyMonkey‟s servers.
4. Be aware of your own privacy requirements.
Many organizations are themselves regulated by data privacy laws and regulations, as well
as internal policies. You should ensure that you are familiar with these, as you will be
responsible for ensuring that your survey complies with these requirements.