The Pollfish Survey Process for Reviewing and Approving Surveys

survey process

The survey process at Pollfish involves a variety of factors and actions that ensure quality results from your deployed surveys. 

As soon as a researcher hits “checkout” on the Pollfish online survey platform, their survey undergoes a process of survey review and approval before it launches.

This way, the researcher can rest assured that their survey is error-free and the questions make sense, should they choose to add survey logic or advanced skip logic. The last thing you would want is to have poorly structured surveys that confuse your target audience.

After a survey gets approved and is launched, it still undergoes a rigorous post-launch survey process using artificial intelligence, as the survey is being completed and responses are gathered. 

This weeds out quality data and prevents survey fraud from the Pollfish network. 

This article explains the survey process of reviewing and approving surveys before they get deployed on our massive publishers’ network. 

How the Review and Approval Survey Process Works

After you reach the third (and final) section of the Pollfish online survey platform — the checkout action — you can check out your survey by hitting the “Submit for approval” button.

This begins the review and approval process, in which members of the Pollfish review team — examine your survey before launching it. Not all surveys will be launched upon review. Some surveys may require you to go back and fix an issue that the Review team had flagged.

If the team has any concerns with any aspect of a survey, they will communicate them in the form of comments. These comments can exist as an add-on to a question or its structure. Thus, you’ll see them in your survey after the Review team adds them.

Comments can be either mandatory or optional. When researchers receive both mandatory and optional comments, they must address both forms of comments, otherwise, their survey will not launch. With mandatory comments, you must edit your question according to the suggestion(s) in the comment.

With optional comments, although you do not have to follow their orders, you still ought to acknowledge them so that your survey can go live. To do so, you’ll need to click the accompanying “OK, got it” button.

Once you’ve responded to the comments, by either following their orders or clicking the acknowledgment button, the Review team will be notified and your survey will be under review once more. 

From there on, the team can approve the survey and launch it immediately across our wide network of publishing partners. These include websites, apps and mobile sites. 

Before the Review team approves a survey, researchers can withdraw it. 

This process does not apply to the Distribution Link feature, in which researchers send surveys to specific individuals, rather than a large network of visitors of different digital properties. 

Elite accounts can contact their account manager if they need extra tips or advice for the review process. 

What Happens in the Review and Approval Survey Process 

When the survey review process starts, the survey under review is locked, thus, no changes can be made to it by the researchers. 

If the researcher wants to make any last-minute changes, they must contact the team to apply them. This can be done via the support chat or a phone call. 

survey process

During the review and approval survey process, the Review team searches for errors that could cause the client’s survey to not function properly. The goal of the team is to intervene with the survey design as little as possible, leaving the original design up to the use of the platform.

The review team suggests best practices based on our methodology, whenever they are applicable, along with checking for compliance with our policies.

The team will start flagging aspects of the survey by making mandatory comments (in which questions or aspects of the survey must be edited/changed). Optional comments offer suggestions to optimize the design of the platform to get the best possible outcome for your market research goals. 

The review process can be completed in as quick as several minutes or take up to 2 hours. This is because there may be a lot of surveys in the pipeline. Elite surveys have a higher priority in the review queue.

Mandatory and Optional Comments

Not all surveys will receive comments, as the review team adds them to resolve errors. If there are no errors, the survey is launched immediately after the review.

When you have both types of comments in a single review — mandatory and optional,  the survey goes back to draft status. Also, in the case of both, they go to a draft state, in which researchers need to edit and resubmit the survey.

Mandatory comments or both mandatory and optional comments render the survey to a draft state and researchers must apply the changes asked for in the comments. 

In the previous cases, researchers will need to edit their survey again and resubmit it for review. After sending a survey back with mandatory comments, the survey goes back to the draft status — the draft tab in the dashboard.

As such, a survey with mandatory comments goes to a draft state, in which researchers need to edit and resubmit the survey.

Optional comments only grant the survey an approved state, but in the case of both mandatory and optional comments, researchers still must acknowledge the comments. After hitting “OK, got it” in optional comments, researchers can then launch their survey. 

The comments can be seen within the questionnaire. 

If the review consists of optional comments only, the researcher can proceed with two options. They can proceed with one of these two actions directly from the review email that they’ll have received. 

The first optional action is to launch the survey directly, with no review process thereafter and without opening the questionnaire again. 

To do so, you would need to click on the 3 dots next to the survey in the ”approved” tab in their dashboard, then select “launch now.” 

The second option is to edit the questionnaire if they seek to proceed with the optional suggestions and go through the review process again. To do so, you would need to click on the 3 dots next to the survey in the ”approved” tab on the dashboard and select ‘’edit.”

If researchers don’t make any changes to mandatory comments, they’ll repeat the survey process, as the survey will be blocked. It will be blocked until all mandatory options are addressed by adding their respective changes. 

For example:

If there are 10 mandatory comments, but the researcher only made changes to 2 of them, the survey will still be blocked and they’ll continue receiving emails to address the comments. 

If the researcher resubmits the survey without making any changes, the process will repeat. They also have the option to contact the support team.

In short, optional comments get an approved state. Researchers can edit if they want and resubmit the survey, or launch it without resubmitting.

Pollfish could be flexible when it comes to specific mandatory comments. For example:

In a question that asks for the sentiments of respondents, typically, statements that are contradictory in multiple selection questions will be flagged. The team will make a comment for this kind of question to be changed to a single selection question.

However, if the purpose is to collect all sentiments of the respondents, due to their complexity, the researchers can ask for the mandatory status to be removed by either replying to the email (more on emails in the second section below) or by chatting/calling a support team member.

They can chat within the survey. Then, a review member will evaluate the request, and if it complies with our policies, they will disregard the comment.

How Surveys Are Rejected in the Process

The review team can reject the surveys for any reason in the system. If a survey is rejected (due to one or multiple comments that need to be either acknowledged or fixed), it will be sent back.

Aside from technical issues in the comments, which can relate to improper survey logic or any of the types of survey questions wrongly formed, surveys can also be rejected for the following reasons:

  1. Violating the terms of the survey
  2. Design issues

Unique Respondents Across Surveys

If researchers need to send them to different respondents, they must reach out via chat and tell the support team that they have two or more surveys and want to group them on the backend so they will get unique respondents. This must be done before submitting the survey at the checkout. 

For example, they may have the same audience to see a campaign: highly educated people in the US, but need different individuals in the audience to see a certain campaign survey, and others to see a different survey.

Scheduled Surveys

When the team approves a survey that is scheduled, the survey gets an approved status. This means it goes to the approved tab until the launching date and time.  

Researchers must acknowledge comments even if the survey is scheduled. If they don’t acknowledge the comments, the survey won’t launch.

To make changes or acknowledge the comments, you must edit the survey, and then checkout. Doing so will enact the required or optional change. By clicking on “submit,” the survey process for review and approval starts again.

Emails in the Survey Process

Emails play a major role in the survey process of review and approval, as they are the main communication tool between the review team and platform and the users of Pollfish.

Researchers will receive a series of emails. The first email is a confirmation that you submitted the survey for approval. Often, the second email relays that your survey requires action. This type of email will include notice of either mandatory or optional comments.

The optional email will be titled as such: “Our survey review team has recommendations only.” 

survey process

The mandatory email will be titled as such: “ACTION REQUIRED: Please edit your survey [name of the survey] for it to start.” The body of both kinds of emails will inform you that your survey has recommendations. However, the mandatory one is marked as such in red in the body.

If you’ve made all the necessary changes to the mandatory comments and acknowledged all the optional ones, you will then resubmit the survey. 

Issues in the Survey Process that Prompt Comments

The review team comes upon different issues during the survey review and approval process. As aforementioned, these issues hamper the launch of the survey and are up to the researcher to fix. 

The previous section on how surveys are rejected gives a few key examples of issues that cause the team to block the survey and place comments for the researcher to address.

The following lists more key issues that prompt comments and temporary blocks to surveys:

  1. Personal Information
    1. Per the Pollfish terms and conditions, we do not allow questions collecting personally identifiable information and/or contact information (such as name, address, place of work, phone number, email address, etc.) to protect the respondents’ privacy and anonymity. 
    2. We also do not allow researchers to share their own personal or contact information through the survey.
  2. Links/URLs in questions/answers
    1. We do not allow researchers to insert links within questions redirecting respondents outside the survey environment; per our methodology, a respondent’s participation will be considered abandonment if they click on the link.
  3. Proper language selection
    1. The survey’s language must be the same as the language selected on the audience page, at the upper left corner of the Audience page. 
  4. Questions about Age or Gender 
    1. Pollfish shares by default each respondent’s age range on the results page and their specific year of birth (and therefore age) in the downloadable Excel file.
    2. We also provide, by default, each respondent’s gender in the results.
  5. Age restrictions regarding the survey’s content
    1. Based on the content of the survey, you must target adults above 18 or 21 years old to take your survey if there is an age restriction in your targeted market. 
  6. Sensitive questions and content 
    1. Surveys including sensitive content must meet the three following criteria:  
      1. Respondents must be adults above 18 years old. You can review your age targeting in the audience tab. 
      2. The survey must contain one initial screening question stating the study’s content, for example, ‘the following survey contains questions regarding alcoholic behavior. Are you willing to take part in the following survey? Your responses are anonymous.” 
        1. Statement 1; Yes, I’m above the age of 18, and I’m giving you my consent. 
        2. Statement 2; No, I do not wish to take part. 
    2. Then, you must add one description question briefly explaining the content of the survey and why you want to know this information or how you will use it. 
  7. Multiple Open-Ended questions combined in one question 
    1. You must not combine multiple Open-Ended questions into one since it causes confusion and frustration to the respondents.
  8. Demographic questions
    1. We provide, by default, the demographic data of the respondents, so you don’t need to include questions to collect them. 
    2. If you choose to include demographic questions, we will not provide the relevant demographic data, to avoid any repetition, which might affect our respondents’ experience. 
  9. A question with a topic that does not match its targeting
    1. When your question is aimed towards a specific demographic, you need to add Skip Logic to the previous question referencing the audience filters; this way, only the relevant audience will respond to this question, whereas the rest will skip it.
    2. Read more on how to implement advanced survey logic.
  10. Promotional content
    1. We do not allow any promotional content (e.g., website links, subscriptions, discounts, etc.) within the questionnaire. Pollfish is a market research platform and not a traffic provider.

Getting the Best Out of Surveys

Researchers should use a mobile-first online survey platform to get quality results at speed, as mobile dominates the digital space. No one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.  

Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

The survey platform should offer advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. 

It should also allow you to survey any employee. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of users, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific respondents, instead of only deploying them across a vast network. 

With Pollfish, you’ll have all of these capabilities, along with having your surveys reviewed and examined by a wealth of experts.