A survey is a data collection tool: a set of one or more questions that are answered by participants or organizations, either on a one-time basis or at regular intervals. Responses can be analyzed within Compyle to track trends and progress, and if set up correctly, can be fed into Scorecards.
A data collection is a set of related surveys. Each survey you create can be part of a data collection, or one-off surveys can go in the general Surveys collection.
As an example, you can have separate data collections for surveys for youth clubs, college students, and senior citizens. Each data collection is listed with the number of surveys it contains, and the number of open survey instances (instances open for incoming response submissions).
Clicking a data collection opens its list of surveys. For each survey, you can see the number of questions and compylations, as well as instances in progress, pending, or complete.
Clicking a survey displays its details and list of instances. An instance is each time the survey was sent out to participants.
Farther down on a survey page is its list of questions.
Finally, clicking a survey instance displays participant and completion details: who has not yet started the survey, who has started but not completed, and who has completed.
Once enough data has come in, any survey question can be used to create a compylation - a graphical representation of the answers to any survey question, compiled over time.
