Feedback
Help Center

Creating Great Surveys

Start creating your surveys from Home or our header.

We streamlined SurveyMonkey’s Home so it’s quick and simple to Start a survey. It streamlines the way you create and publish your surveys.

Create your survey by choosing your start method:

Start methodDescription
Start from an ideaLet Build with AI and Import with AI create a draft survey. Type your survey goal or copy and paste your survey content to generate a survey draft.

Be sure to exclude sensitive information in your prompt. 

Choose to use the drafted survey and edit it, or return to edit the prompt to re-generate a new draft.
Start from a templateChoose from 500+ expert-built templates and proven frameworks, tailored to different roles and industries.

Explore our templates by browsing or filtering templates by Plan type or Category. If you're on a team, you can also browse your team survey templates.

Click on any template to learn more about it and preview its questions. Then click Create survey.
Start from scratchIf you want to build a survey on your own. with full functionality of the Design survey tab. Add your questions or other content, then head to Style to update your settings and theme

Once you like your survey draft, cycle through the different device modes to check that your survey displays great, on any device.

No matter how you started and created your survey, you get to edit and finalize your survey using either:

  • The full editor for the greatest customization available to all customers 
  • Lightweight editor (in Beta)—is SurveyMonkey’s lightweight survey editor and tone and theme polisher. It’s ideal for shorter or simple surveys where you get to publish your survey in minutes. Learn more: Adding and Editing Questions.

If you completed Your Profile, SurveyMonkey offers suggestions that match your use case and help quickly draft survey. 

For more on each start option, expand the options below. 

  • Start from an idea
  • Start from a template
  • Start from scratch

Select Create survey from the SurveyMonkey header on any screen to choose a survey creation starting point. 

Expand section for more info:

  • Start from scratch
  • Copy an existing survey
  • Build with AI
  • Pick a popular template
  • Paste your questions
  • Build a target audience
  • Use proven research methods

Depending on how you created your survey, you customize your survey design in either our:

  • Full editors—From the Design survey tab, use the Build and Style sub-tabs to build your custom, and possibly complex surveys. Depending on your plan, you get access to all customization features, like logic or adding paid questions, or
  • Quick create (in Beta)—Build a simple, 6-question or under survey, get recommendations by use case and expert recommendations, so you can quickly publish your survey.

The Build tab in the Design Survey section lets you add or edit questions, page elements, and survey options directly in your survey preview. You can select from pre-written, Question Bank questions or apply additional question settings to further customize your respondent’s experience.

Select Logic if you want to apply logic to the survey. Logic can help you get better data by creating a more personalized survey experience for respondents.

For example, use question skip logic to control which questions respondents see next based on their answer to a previous question. Or, you can use advanced branching for the most powerful logic customizations.

Select Style to fine-tune the look and feel of your survey using our Style and branding settings and Themes

Select Preview survey to test how the survey respondent experience is, so you can catch any errors or logic issues.

We offer various ways you can work with other people on survey design, publishing, and analysis. 

When creating your survey, we recommend these tips:

  1. Define your objectives. What do you need to make a decision on or how are you going to focus your survey.
  2. Work backwards. Once you've set your objectives, determine what data you need from your survey to get the respondents input on your decision.
  3. Check for bias. Make sure you're not asking leading questions.
  4. Preview to test drive the respondent experience. You can review a Preview or share your survey with others for a responses-in-Analyze test run. Collaboration and feedback on your drafted questions and answer options is very helpful, and especially necessary for more complex, logic-based surveys.