How to Collect Personal Details While Maintaining Anonymity

Sometimes there is a requirement to maintain the anonymity of each respondent but collect personal and/or contact details, such as when you wish to offer a prize as an incentive for completing the survey.

With Survey Galaxy it is possible to achieve this by separating the survey responses from the personal details.

To do this you will need to create two surveys, the first being the primary survey where the respondent's responses are to be anonymous, the second that will request each respondent for their personal details.

Create and fully test both surveys. When you are satisfied that both surveys are complete publish both surveys.

Select the primary survey and use the 'Edit Details' menu option and set the 'Survey Exit' option to 'Redirect to a web page' and specify the second survey's URL in the 'Web Site URL' field.

When respondents finish completing the primary survey then will on submitting their responses be automatically redirected to the second survey.

This method will provide you with two datasets, one containing the anonymous responses and the second containing personal and/or contact details.

If you use this method we recommend that you assure the respondents at the start of the second survey that the anonymity of the previous responses will be respected as to the respondent this method may appear seamless to them and they may assume that they are completing just one survey.

Please note that using the method described above the spirit of anonymity is maintained but it is important to appreciate that for a small sample it may be possible for the publisher to match the responses with the contact details.

If more security was required to achieve total anonymity the two surveys should be split between two separate people with individual Survey Galaxy accounts so that no person has access to both datasets.

Please contact Survey Galaxy should you have a specific requirement that is not covered by the above.