Collect responses to a 360° survey
You can run 360° surveys which collect several people’s perspectives on the progress or performance of an individual contact.
What you’ll cover in this article
How it works
Your CONTACTS are the subjects | The people whose perspectives you’re gathering are called PERSPECTIVE PROVIDERS | You can COMPARE responses from CONTACTS and PERSPECTIVE PROVIDERS |
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Why use 360° surveys?
Holistic Understanding: 360° Surveys allow you to collect feedback from multiple perspectives to gain a full-circle view of how actions, behaviours, or training are perceived by others.
Triangulate Your Impact: You’ll identify patterns and areas of alignment or divergence when you combine feedback from different sources. This gives you a clearer picture of your impact.
Encourage Honest Communication: Anonymity and structured questions foster open and constructive feedback, creating opportunities for authentic growth.
Highlight Blind Spots: Discover strengths or challenges you might not notice through self-reflection surveys alone.
Step-by-step Instructions
Considerations for survey design
You can use Waves to tailor the wording of your survey questions so that they are worded appropriately for each type of respondent
E.g. a parent who has done a parenting course might see
“How often do you provide encouragement to your child?”
whereas the spouse of the parent might see “How often do you feel that your spouse encourages your child?”
When you use use Questions with Shared Answer Choices your responses are automatically displayed on an interactive Outcome Ring that lets you overlay responses from contacts with average responses from perspective providers.
How to collect 360° survey responses
Requirements
To send a survey to a perspective provider, your survey must be added to a project. I.e. there must be a survey campaign.
Open the Surveys menu in your left sidebar and select Survey Campaigns
Select the survey you want to use and the project you’re using it within. (i.e. the Survey Campaign)
You arrive on your Survey Campaign page
Choose Invite people to complete a survey → then click 360° Observers → then click Next: Share the link
This takes you to the Send Surveys to Perspective Providers page
The page displays a list of the contacts within the project
When you click a contact, it launches the Perspective Providers popup for that contact.
The screenshot shows the popup for a contact called Andrew Arling.
The Perspective Providers table displays any Perspective Providers that have already been added for that contact.
Select the Perspective Providers whom you want to invite to complete this survey about the contact: (these people will be sent an email inviting them to complete a survey about this contact)
From this popup you can also add new Perspective Providers. In the Add New perspective providers text box, simply type in the email address of new people that you want to add as Perspective Providers for this contact
Press Save once you have selected all the Perspective Providers you want to add. This will close the popup.
The Perspective Providers you have added are displayed in the Survey Distribution List.
The list is nested.
It shows the name of the contact in bold and then below that, it shows the names of the Perspective Providers.
STEP 2: You can add optionally an add additional message that will be inserted into the email that is sent to the Perspective Providers.
Press the Send Survey button
How to collect 360° survey responses using the Advanced Layout
Go to the Survey Campaign page for that survey on that project and select Advanced layout
Select the Send Survey button below where it says Perspective Providers
Click the Send Survey button
This takes you to the Send Surveys to Perspective Providers page
The page displays a list of the contacts within the project
When you click a contact, it launches the Perspective Providers popup for that contact.
The screenshot shows the popup for a contact called Andrew Arling.
The Perspective Providers table displays any Perspective Providers that have already been added for that contact.
Select the Perspective Providers whom you want to invite to complete this survey about the contact: (these people will be sent an email inviting them to complete a survey about this contact)
From this popup you can also add new Perspective Providers. In the Add New perspective providers text box, simply type in the email address of new people that you want to add as Perspective Providers for this contact
Press Save once you have selected all the Perspective Providers you want to add. This will close the popup.
The Perspective Providers you have added are displayed in the Survey Distribution List.
The list is nested.
It shows the name of the contact in bold and then below that, it shows the names of the Perspective Providers.
STEP 2: You can add optionally an add additional message that will be inserted into the email that is sent to the Perspective Providers.
Press the Send Survey button.
On the Perspective Providers popup for a contact, the user can send a SMS inviting the Perspective Provider of that contact to complete a survey by just clicking on the checkbox next to their Phone Number.
When the user enters a new Phone Number, then a new contact will be created who is a witness where the Name and their Phone Number will be their Phone Number.
Steps for the Perspective Provider who receives the email
Each Perspective Provider will receive an email.
The subject of the email is the name of the beneficiary they are a Perspective Providers of and the name of the Survey
The email contains
(1) the custom message that was inserted;
(2) a unique create story url which allows the Perspective Provider to create a story about that beneficiary using the story category of the Survey Campaign for the project of the Survey Campaign
When the Perspective Provider clicks the link, they arrive on the Complete A Survey page where they can complete the survey (create a story using that Story Category) for the contact that they are a Perspective Provider for.
Once the Perspective Provider has completed the survey (i.e. created the story about that contact) they are taken to the Successful Completion page
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