Making Responses Anonymous

The Anonymous Responses collector option lets you choose whether or not to track and store identifiable respondent information in survey results. SurveyMonkey records respondent IP addresses in backend logs and deletes them after 13 months.

Tips for Anonymous Surveys

• If you’re using multiple collectors, you need to turn on Anonymous Responses in each collector.
• If you want your survey to be anonymous, don’t include identifiable questions in your survey design and don’t use identifiable custom data or custom variables when sending your survey.
• If you have an Enterprise plan, Primary Admins can choose a default Anonymous Responses setting for their entire team.

Web Links

Web Links record the IP addresses of respondents by default.

To turn on Anonymous Responses:

1. Go to the Collect Responses section of your survey.
2. Click the name of the collector.
3. Click Anonymous Responses and choose On.

Email Invitations

Email Invitations are designed to help you track respondents, so your survey results will include the email address and IP address of each respondent by default. Additionally, the first name, last name, and custom data about your contacts is tracked, if you included this information in the collector.

To turn on Anonymous Responses:

1. Go to the Collect Responses section of your survey.
2. Click the name of the collector.
3. Go to the collector options. If you've already sent an invitation, go to the Options tab. When sending your first invitation message in the collector, you'll choose collector options after composing your message.
4. Click Anonymous Responses.
5. Choose to exclude all respondent information to exclude first name, last name, email address, IP address, and custom data from your results. Or choose only exclude personal information to exclude first name, last name, email address, and IP address from your results.

Facebook Messenger

By default, the Facebook Messenger collector doesn't pass any identifying information to SurveyMonkey, it only passes the survey responses.

Other Collector Types

By default, most collectors record the IP addresses of respondents in survey results. You can turn on Anonymous Responses to prevent IP tracking.

To turn on Anonymous Responses:

1. Go to the collector options for your collector
2. Turn on Make Anonymous or turn off Save IP Address in Results?

Respondent Authentication

When Respondent Authentication is turned on, the survey is never anonymous because the survey taker’s SSO profile information is tracked.

Collectors Created by Integrations

Some integrations automatically create collectors in SurveyMonkey, like the Microsoft Teams integration. Whether a survey is anonymous or not is dependent on the integration's settings rather than the Anonymous Responses collector option.