More and more organisations are putting effort into understanding how their different projects contribute to their overall goals and impact. In practice, this means, that projects now also collect indicator data relevant to the organisation as a whole. Such data must be collected in a consistent way to allow for aggregation and disaggregation on the organisational level.

This has implications for how you design your surveys. For the organisational indicators, these questions need to be asked in a consistent way, with the same question definitions (the text, variable names, limitations, dependencies, etc) in order to be consistent on the organisational level. However, projects still need to have the flexibility to collect data they need as well.

In collaboration with a few of our partners, we have developed a prototype feature to support this need.

What is it?

A survey is set to act as a template. This means, that questions in this surveys can be locked. When creating a new survey, you can choose to use a blank survey or to use a template. Once the new survey is created from a template, the locked questions cannot be edited. All unlocked questions can be changed. New questions and question groups can be added. Entire question groups can be deleted, even if all the questions in this group are locked. You can lock one question, or lock them all depending on your needs.

How does it work?

1. A survey is designed in Flow – as usual.
2. If you want to use this survey as a template, in the survey settings click to mark as a template.
3. Now you can see the setting Make this question locked when copied on each question of the survey form. Once this survey template is used to create a new survey, the locked questions cannot be edited.
4. Go to create a new survey and select From template. Select the template you want to use and the new survey will be created for you. Make sure to check in the Messages tab that is survey creation is completed.