Running Surveys and Assessments

Surveys let you collect structured input from your board or a committee — annual board evaluations, skills matrices, meeting feedback, or any questionnaire where you need attributed (or anonymous) answers with a clear record of who responded and when.

Creating a survey

1. From your organization's home, open Compliance and choose Surveys.
2. Select New Survey.
3. Give it a title, and optionally an introduction — this appears at the top of the survey for respondents, so it's a good place for instructions ("Please rate yourself honestly; responses guide recruitment and education planning").
4. Choose the board or committee. The people list updates to that group's members, and everyone is selected by default.

Question types

• Short text / Long text — free-form answers.
• Yes/No — optionally with a details box for context.
• Multiple choice — one answer from a list you define.
• Rating scale — a numeric scale (3, 4, 5, 7, or 10 points).
• Guided rating — a labeled scale (rating guide) defined once and reused across questions (see below).

Each question can also carry help text shown under the question — useful for definitions ("Experience with M&A transactions including negotiation and pricing…") — and a section heading to group related questions.

Rating guides

For assessments where many questions share the same scale — a skills matrix rating every competency from Minimal to Expert, for example — define a rating guide once instead of retyping the choices:

1. In the survey form, under Rating guides, select Add rating guide.
2. Name it (e.g., "Skills rating") and define its levels. Each level has a short label and an optional definition — the definition tells respondents exactly what qualifies ("Advanced: 3+ years' experience in this skill as a senior leader").
3. Add questions with the Guided Rating type and pick your guide.

Respondents see the guide's full legend at the top of each section, so they always know what the levels mean. You can define more than one guide per survey — for instance, one scale for skills and a different one for leadership behaviours.

Directing questions to specific people

By default every question goes to everyone you select as a respondent. Under Who should answer this? on each question, you can narrow it to a subset by governance attribute:

• Members of a committee — only people who sit on a committee you choose.
• People with a specific role — e.g. only committee chairs.
• By independence — independent or non-independent directors.

Respondents only see (and are only required to answer) the questions directed to them. Results tally against the people each question was directed to, so an audience-restricted question isn't misread as "hardly anyone answered." In the per-person grid, a cell that wasn't directed to someone shows a faint dot, distinct from a blank they simply didn't answer.

Who qualifies is captured when you issue the survey, so a committee change afterward doesn't quietly move who owes answers. Directors whose independence hasn't been recorded are never treated as independent — they're excluded from independence-targeted questions, and the survey shows a banner listing them so you can assess them first.

Anonymous surveys

Check Anonymous Responses when candour matters more than attribution. Individual answers are never linked to names in results or exports. Leave it off for self-assessments like skills matrices, where knowing who answered is the point.

Issuing and tracking

When you issue a survey, respondents are notified and it appears in their Action Required list. You can send reminders manually, or leave automated reminders on. The survey page shows who has submitted and who is still pending.

Results

Once responses arrive, open Results:

• Each question shows its answer distribution — every choice or level is listed, including those nobody picked.
• For attributed surveys, a Responses by person grid shows every answer at a glance — the roll-up you'd previously assemble by hand.
• Export everything as CSV (for further analysis, e.g. comparing against targets) or PDF (for a committee packet or AGM materials). For an attributed survey, the PDF lists who gave each answer alongside the totals and ends with the same Responses by person grid, so it stands on its own as a filing record.
• For an attributed survey, Export anonymized PDF produces the same results with respondent names removed — useful for reviewing an evaluation together in the room without revealing who said what. Note that free-text answers can still identify their author, so review before sharing.

Results are visible only to you (as the secretary or an admin) and to anyone you explicitly designate as a results recipient — see below. Board members who take the survey don't see the results unless you designate them.

Delegating a survey

On a survey's page, the Delegated access card lets you hand off pieces of a survey to specific people without giving them organization-wide or secretary powers — the same way a meeting invitation grants a guest access to just that meeting. Add a person and choose what they can do:

• Can administer — edit, issue, send reminders, and close this survey. Useful when you hire someone to run an assessment, or an external advisor administers it. They can be a guest in your organization.
• Receives results — view and export the results once the survey closes, and get a notification when it does. Route results to the person who needs them (for example, the governance committee chair) without opening them to everyone.

You can add or revoke delegated access at any time — including after the survey is issued — so a mistaken delegation is easy to correct. Every change is recorded in the survey's governance history (who delegated or revoked access, and when), so the trail is always explainable. Grant only what each person needs.

Reusing surveys

Annual instruments like a board evaluation or skills matrix rarely change much from year to year. To run one again, open last year's survey and choose Re-use at the top of the page:

• Re-use this survey opens a new survey form filled in with the same questions, sections, rating guides, and question audiences. Update the title, pick a due date, and confirm who should respond — Boardwise starts you with the current members of the board or committee, not last year's respondents. Nothing is created until you save.
• Save as template does the same, but keeps the copy as a template so it appears under From Template whenever anyone starts a new survey.

Either way, the original survey is left exactly as it was. Its responses, respondents, delegated access, and due date stay with it and are never copied into the new one. You can re-use a survey at any stage — draft, issued, or closed — and it works even if the template it was first built from has since been deleted.

You can also check Save as template while building a survey to keep it as a reusable starting point from the outset.

Related: Working with Action Items, Managing committees