Tiny Tip Tuesday #15

Are your surveys secure?

A lot of people feel more confident about answering surveys when they know that the information that they're going to share will not be misused. Let's look at the different ways you can make sure your survey is secure:

Keep it anonymous:

Being able to remain anonymous motivates people to answer surveys more honestly. Avoid asking personal identifying questions in your surveys unless you have a good reason. State the reason as a descriptive text, before the survey questions, so the respondents understand the purpose of the personal questions. Also, if you're claiming it to be an anonymous survey, make sure you stick to that claim. Remove IP addresses and any other kind of tracking from your surveys.

Password protection:

Password-protecting your surveys ensures that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Distribute your surveys, as well as its reports, only to trusted individuals by securing it with a password to maintain maximum security of the information passed. This also allows you to safely share the surveys with private groups and organizations. No one outside these groups will be able to access the surveys.

You can further restrict access by preventing multiple people answering from the same device or the same URL. R eassure your respondents by stating the measures taken to protect the information gathered. Make sure your surveys are SSL-certified. SSL establishes a secure connection to the server for your respondents. Any survey created on Zoho's domain in automatically SSL-certified. But if you're hosting the surveys on your own domain, be sure to get it certified as secure, especially in the EU region, without which it will not work.

We'll be back next week with another tip!