Variables

With variables (also known as piping), you can dynamically reuse answers, data enrichment, or custom content throughout your survey. Think of personalizing an email invitation, a confirmation message, or a follow-up question. You can create variables for purposes such as:

1. Reusing given answers anywhere in the questionnaire (in a question or an answer).
2. Displaying a given answer in a confirmation message.
3. Randomly showing certain questions (or statements) to respondents by assigning them a characteristic.
4. Sending a confirmation message to an email address entered in the survey.

Creating a Variable

1. Go to the ‘Questions’ menu > ‘Variable’.
2. Click on ‘Quickly create variable using wizard’.
3. Select the question whose (open) answer you want to use.
4. Click ‘Next’.
5. Under ‘Fill variable with’, choose how the variable should be populated.
6. Give the variable a clear name, such as email or answer_question3.
7. Click ‘Continue’.

Alternative Answer Text (Closed Questions)

After creating a survey variable and setting the variable rule, you can optionally define alternative answer text for each closed answer as a fill-in rule:

1. Click ‘Variable Rule’ next to the created variable.
2. For closed answers, enter an alternative text (e.g., ‘He’ or ‘She’).
3. Leave open answers blank.
4. Click ‘Save’.

After you have created the variable, this icon will appear at the right edge of the menu: . This contains the created variables and data enrichment. Both are indicated with different symbols. The variables can be identified by [{variable}] and the enrichment by [[enrichment]].

Process variable in e-mail

To include a variable in an email, go to the ‘Communication’ menu and open the confirmation email where you want to insert the variable.
For example, if you created an open-answer field for ‘Name’, you can insert the variable [[Name]] into the email.
In the confirmation message, the respondent’s name (as entered in the survey) will appear.
If you’ve collected the respondent’s name via an open question, create a variable from that answer and insert its code into the (confirmation) email.

User Agent

Want to know what kind of device the respondent is using? Manually create a variable called User Agent and set its fill rule to useragent. This variable will automatically capture the respondent’s browser and device type.