Survey scenarios
Survey scenarios let you control which pages of a survey a respondent sees, based on the answers they give. Instead of showing every question to every respondent, you route people through
the survey based on what's relevant to them.
Why use scenarios
Without scenarios, you face a trade-off: include all your questions and make the survey long, or leave questions out to keep it manageable. Scenarios resolve this. A question only appears for the respondents it's relevant to, so each person sees a shorter, focused survey while you still collect the full range of data you need.
Scenarios also eliminate the "not applicable" problem, instead of asking respondents to skip over questions that don't apply to them, the survey skips those questions automatically. This makes the experience cleaner and reduces drop-off.
When you route respondents through different paths based on a characteristic, you can compare results between those groups side by side in the comparative report.
Prerequisites
- Your survey must have at least two pages before you can create a scenario.
- Scenarios can only be set up on multiple choice questions with a maximum of one possible answer.
Attention Scenarios cannot be set up on multiple choice (multiple answers), text fields, rating scales, or any other question type. Only multiple choice with one answer supports branching.
How scenarios work
A scenario is a branching rule attached to a specific answer on a multiple choice question. When a respondent selects that answer, the survey jumps to a specific page rather than continuing to the next page in sequence.
Example: a cosmetics company asks "Are you male or female?" on page 1. If the respondent selects "Male", the survey jumps to page 3 (questions about men's products). If they select "Female", it continues to page 2 (questions about women's products). Each group sees only the questions relevant to them.
Set up a scenario
- Go to Forms, then Surveys.
- Click the gear icon next to your survey and select Edit survey scenario.
- In the scenario editor, you see all your questions and pages. At the end of each page, choose which page the survey goes to next: the next page in sequence, a specific page, or End survey.
- For individual multiple choice questions (one answer only), you can set a different destination per answer option. Select an answer option and choose the page it should lead to.
- Click Save scenario.
Support tip Sketch your scenario on paper before setting it up in Flexmail. A simple flowchart with pages as boxes and answers as arrows makes the logic clear and prevents routing errors.
Test your scenario
Before sending the survey to contacts, complete it yourself and verify that each answer routes to the correct next page. Test every path, not just the most common one. A scenario that routes incorrectly is hard to fix after you've collected responses.
Next steps
- See 'Survey question types reference' for details on the multiple choice (one answer) question type.
- See 'Survey reports' to use the comparative report to compare results across different scenario paths.
- See 'Survey best practices' for guidance on when and how to use scenarios effectively.