Sharing Survey Results via URL

Any paid SurveyMonkey user can share results of a survey without compromising access or security of the account.  With this feature you can control what privileges people have with the data; like whether or not you'd like them to see just a summary view of responses; be able to download responses, or even peruse the open-ended responses of your respondents.

This article walks you through creating and managing a URL for sharing your survey results with others:

• Creating a Shared Responses URL 
• About Permissions on the URL
• Password Protecting the URL
• Sharing Results Publicly with SurveyMonkey
• Sharing Segmented or Filtered Data
• Sharing Specific Parts of the Survey
• Instant Results versus Shared Responses URLs

Take a look through our video to get stared, or follow the instructions below. (Note: This video is currently available in English only.)

Creating a Shared Responses URL

First things first, you'll need a paid account with us — any level will do.  Then: 

1. From the My Surveys page, click the Analyze Results icon 
   • If already editing or working on your survey, click  Analyze Results in the upper right.
2. In the gray bar on the left, click Share Responses
3. Click Edit Settings below the Current Sharing Status.
4. Under New Sharing Status, choose between the following permission sets:

• Sharing Disabled 
• Share Summary of Responses Only
• Share Summary of Responses + View Open-Ended Responses
• Share Summary of Responses + View and Browse Individual Responses (admin view)
  • Allow Filtering of Responses
  • Allow Downloading of Responses

5. Click Save Changes
6. Double-click the URL that appears, and copy it to send to your audience reviewing the results, via your own email or communication client.

About Permissions on the URL

The Shared Results feature can be configured to give different levels of access to your audience. Here's a bit more about each:

Password protecting the URL is a cinch.  This makes sense if you want to add an extra layer of security to the results, so that just in case it gets forwarded to the wrong party there's another requirement to see the results.  You can configure the password to be whatever you'd like.  Here's how:

1. Follow the steps above here, and choose any of the following options under New Sharing Status: Share Summary of Responses Only, Share Summary of Responses + View Open-Ended Responses, or Share Summary of Responses + View and Browse Individual Responses (admin view).
2. Below your selections, tick the checkbox for Password Protect Shared Responses.
3. You'll see a number of options appear once this is chosen.  Here's how to approach each field:

• Password: You can enter any kind of password, it just has to be less than 50 characters.  Alphanumeric characters are fine!
• Password Label: This is the label that describes the input box for the password.  In some cases, companies or groups will call it a "Key" or "Credentials" depending on culture or use case.
• Submit Button Label: This label is on the button viewers will push when they've entered an attempt at the password.  It can be customized to anything - "Submit," "Go!" or something else you prefer.
• Password Required Message: Here you can use HTML if you like to format the message, but this is basically just the message your viewer sees when they try to access the survey.
• Password Failed Message: This is the message unsuccessful attempts will show folks who aren't entering the password quite right.  There's no way to get locked out; but the only way to get in is to use the exact password.

Here's an example of what a shared results link might look like when password-protected.  The password is 12345.

Sharing Results Publicly

You can tick the checkbox to permit your results to be shared publicly in a gallery.  At this time, we don't have a gallery up; but this is something we hope to have available in the future.

Sharing Segmented Data

It's not uncommon to want to share results with specific filters applied.  However, there are limited options available with our feature right now.  

There isn't a way to have a filter already applied to a shared results link when somebody opens it for the first time, so we definitely recommend a few workarounds, best illustrated in this FAQ: Sharing Filtered Data

You can of course export filtered responses in PDF or Excel and email the file to your team of collaborators until we have a feature like this available.

 

Sharing Specific Parts of the Survey

If you need to hide specific information in the survey, you can definitely do this with the shared responses link.  Here's an FAQ that can help you with concealing confidential or identifiable parts of the survey:  Hide Sensitive Data

For other use cases, sometimes it just makes sense to show the meat of the survey — not all the qualifying questions or details, but just a few questions or pages from the whole.  Here's how to do this: 

1. From the My Surveys page, click the Analyze Results icon 
   • If already editing or working on your survey, click  Analyze Results in the upper right.
2. At the top of the page near the left-hand gray column, click Add Report next to where it says Default Report.
3. Name this report under Name and then tick the checkboxes as you like to choose which questions and pages to include.
4. Click Save Report from the lower right.
5. Click Share Results from the left-hand gray column, and proceed with the steps as you would here.  Just ensure that the report name displayed at the top of the page reflects the one you created, and viewers of your link will see the view you've created.

Instant Results versus Shared Responses URLs

If you'd rather show a quick snapshot summary of the results to respondents to the survey, this can be done quite easily on any plan. If everyone you're showing the survey results to also happened to take the survey, a good option in the future would be to use Instant Results.  

This feature lets each respondent take a look at the overall results, without having access to your account as well.  
To enable this feature:

1. Click Collect Responsesfrom the My Surveys tab, or if already editing or working on your survey, click  Collect Responses in the upper right.
2. For a new collector (method to get responses to your survey), you'll want to walk through choosing one of our collector options, and proceed.  If you're not sure how, here's a great tutorial that can help you out. 
3. From the left-hand gray column, click Change Settings.
4. Choose the option for Display Survey Results about halfway down the page.
5. You can also tick the checkbox for "Display the number of responses for each question and answer option".
6. When done, click Save Settings in the upper right corner.  

Now, when respondents end the survey, they'll see the summary of results for the survey!