Creating your survey is just the first step. To get data-driven insights or actionable feedback, you'll need to publish it. Publishing is what turns your draft into a live survey that people can access and respond to. It locks your survey questions and settings so respondents always see a consistent version, no matter when they open it.  

Create collectors to distribute your survey and track responses. A collector is the distribution channel you use to share your survey and gather answers from your audience. Without responses, a survey is just a set of unanswered questions. A collector is what turns those questions into answers and assumptions into facts by collecting responses. Choose from an array of distribution channels, including email, SMS, and social media, to put your survey right where your audience already is.

Each collector works independently, with its own access settings, response limits, and tracking data. This lets you distribute the same survey through different channels.

Collectors are categorized into three groups. They are as follows:

Public Access Collector - Share your survey using a public link that anyone can access. This link works well for open surveys where responses are anonymous. You can also generate a QR code for your survey and use it at public places. When a survey is set to offline mode, respondents can take the survey even without an internet connection. If you want to reach an audience beyond your existing contacts, you can buy responses from a panel. This option lets you choose a target demographic and receive responses within a given timeframe.

Private Audience Collector - Share your survey with a specific group of respondents rather than making it publicly accessible. This is ideal when you need responses from a targeted audience, such as employees, customers, or invite-only participants. You can send email invites using Zoho Survey, Zoho services such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Billing and Zoho SalesIQ or through other email clients based on your requirement. Using this collector you can set up automated SMS invites to share surveys and collect information at the right time, from the right audience. Additionally, this collector lets you create a unique survey URL for each respondent, so you can track individual responses accurately.

Organization Invites Collector - When you need to collect feedback exclusively from your organization's members, Organization Invites provides a secure, access-controlled method to do so. You can authenticate respondents via Zoho Accounts or via SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) authentication. You can assign separate collectors to different organization groups such as departments, locations, or project teams, allowing you to segment responses without creating multiple surveys.  

 

Below is a visual representation of the types of collectors in Zoho Survey.