Best Practices for Marketing a Customer Survey via Community

Maybe you can publish just an article where non registered members can find and answer the survey.

This has one problem - members can answer as well.

Secondly, you could build Custom page for the members and their survey. Grant access for the registered members.

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We have promoted surveys using just articles.

I’ve done this and did an event like you did. 

I agree on the challenges that creates, especially if you don’t want to share the close date. Alternatively, you could post it as a product update or article and use a third party script to just redirect the URL to the survey (or just include a link in the post itself)

Things I’ve done previously and would recommend: 

1. Use the Topic Banner widget to put it across every page on your community for maximum visibility
2. Award points for filling it out (if it fits within your gamification strategy). Then you can assign points via the API and there’s a prebuilt Zapier action that makes it easy (if you use Zapier). They would need to provide an email in the survey and you’d need to have access to the responses in order to automate this. 

Using mostly those techniques, I was able to get an 11% sample of our active users over a 45 day period a few days back. But our community is very motivated by points and our recognition strategy that comes with it. 

We use Survey Monkey and have created an article on the community under our ‘Community Announcements’ Forum and linked to the survey. We’ve also done a custom widget on the homepage to highlight it and sent an email campaign (which had the highest conversion rate). Anyone who completes the survey receives points and we’ve also done swag prize draws.