Surveys are the centrepiece of Akvo Flow. Create the questions you want to ask, edit the forms and publish them once ready for data collection from the Surveys tab. When you first visit the online workspace, you’ll land on the Surveys page. Here you can create folders to hold your surveys.

Folders

Surveys on the online workspace are kept in folders to help you stay organised. Folders can contain other folders, just as in a regular file system on a computer. This means you have a lot of freedom in organising your surveys. You can assign users specific roles in specific folders, so you can also use the folder structure to organise who has access to what. A folder can also contain a mix of folders and surveys.

To read more on how to work with folders read this article.

Surveys

A survey is used to collect data on a particular subject. Different surveys collect data on different subjects. Surveys live in folders — you can have multiple surveys inside a single folder. Surveys do not directly contain questions, but forms that hold your questions.

To read more on how to work with surveys read this article.

Forms

A survey can consist of one or more forms. A regular survey will only contain a single form. However, if you use monitoring (You can find more information what Flow's monitoring is here: Monitoring - tracking things over time), you can add additional forms to a survey, which capture different aspects about the subject of the survey. For example, if you survey water pumps, you could have a ‘registration form’ that captures the basic information for a water point, a ‘water quality form’, that captures water quality information about that point, and a ‘functionality update form’ that periodically captures the functionality.

To read more on how to work with forms read this article.

Question Groups

Each form contains of questions and the questions are organised into question groups. Each group of questions appears in a separate tab on the screen when answering the questions in the Flow app.

To read more on how to work with question groups read this article.

Questions

In Flow we support a large variety of different question types to help you create a diverse survey. These are the question types available in the Flow system: Free text; Option (select one option or select many using check boxes); Cascade; Number; Geolocation; Photo; Video; Date; Barcode; Geographic shapes, Signature and Akvo Caddisfly, to add a water and soil quality test to your Flow survey. For more details on our question types check this article. When creating a Flow form you can edit the behaviour of the question using multiple settings to customise your survey as much as possible to fit your needs.

To read more on how to work with questions read this article.