Creating a well-designed survey can take a considerable amount of effort, from crafting the perfect questions to arranging them in a logical flow. Once you’ve perfected a survey that works wonderfully for one purpose, it’s natural to want to replicate that success or share that structure with colleagues or other users who might benefit from the same framework. The good news is that SurveyMonkey offers intuitive ways to manage your survey assets and ensure your hard work can be leveraged beyond its initial deployment.
Whether you’re looking to maintain consistency across multiple projects, streamline survey creation for your team, or simply share a successful format, understanding how to effectively manage your survey templates is key. While SurveyMonkey doesn’t have a direct "send template" button in the same way you might send an email attachment, there are robust features that allow for the duplication, sharing, and collaborative use of your existing survey designs, essentially empowering you to send survey template to another SurveyMonkey user through strategic platform features.
Navigating SurveyMonkey for Template Sharing
SurveyMonkey is designed with user collaboration and efficiency in mind, offering several pathways to share and reuse survey structures. The most common approach involves leveraging the platform’s ‘copy’ or ‘duplicate’ feature, which allows you to create an exact replica of an existing survey. This copy can then be either worked on independently or shared with others, depending on your team’s needs and SurveyMonkey plan level. Think of it as creating a master template that can be endlessly cloned without affecting the original.
Beyond simple duplication, SurveyMonkey provides tools for collaboration, enabling multiple users to work on a single survey. This is particularly useful if you need input or edits from another team member before a survey goes live. However, for the purpose of sharing a template for another user to own and modify independently, creating a copy is often the most straightforward method. The other user can then either receive a link to a copied survey that they can then duplicate within their own account, or if they have access to your account (which is not recommended for security unless it is a shared team account), they can directly duplicate it themselves.
Understanding the distinction between collaboration on a live survey and sharing a template for independent use is crucial. Collaboration means multiple people access the same survey instance, whereas template sharing aims for a new, separate instance for the recipient.
Creating and Sharing a Reusable Survey Template
To effectively send a survey template to another SurveyMonkey user, the process typically involves duplicating your existing survey and then making that duplicate accessible.
- Duplicate Your Survey: Start by finding the survey you wish to use as a template. Click on the three dots (ellipsis) next to the survey title in your dashboard and select "Copy Survey." This creates an identical twin of your survey, complete with all questions, logic, and design elements, but without any collected responses. This new copy is now your template.
- Rename for Clarity: Give your duplicated survey a clear name, such as "Customer Feedback Template – Shared Version," to distinguish it and signal its purpose as a reusable asset.
- Share Access (Indirectly): For another user to utilize this template independently, they would typically need to either:
- Access a Shared Team Account: If your organization uses a SurveyMonkey team account, simply creating the template in a shared folder or making it accessible to team members allows others to then copy it for their own use directly from the shared space.
- Provide a Link to Duplicate: You could potentially share a link to a survey that you’ve set up with public access, and then instruct the other user to log into their SurveyMonkey account and "copy" the survey from that link (if SurveyMonkey allows this functionality for public links). However, the most reliable method for true template sharing often involves the other user logging into an account where the template resides, or leveraging export/import features for more complex scenarios.
Leveraging SurveyMonkey Features for Team Efficiency
Beyond simply copying, SurveyMonkey’s features can greatly enhance how teams manage and deploy surveys. For organizations with multiple users, a team plan often provides the most robust solution for sharing and managing survey templates. These plans are specifically designed to facilitate collaboration, allowing team members to access and manage shared surveys and folders. This setup makes it incredibly simple to create a master template once and then have every team member easily create their own working copy.
When you want to send a survey template to another SurveyMonkey user within a team environment, you essentially place it in a shared space accessible to all. From there, any authorized team member can simply navigate to the shared surveys, select the template, and choose to "copy" it to their own account or a project folder. This ensures consistency across all surveys created from that template, maintaining brand voice, question types, and data structure, which is invaluable for consistent reporting and analysis.
For instances where a direct "transfer" isn’t feasible or desired, consider alternative methods. You could export your survey design as a file (if supported by your plan) and then have the other user import it into their own account. While this might involve a few more steps, it achieves the same goal of providing a structured survey framework. The key is to think about the end goal: does the other user need to simply see the template, or do they need an editable version that lives entirely within their own SurveyMonkey account?
Ultimately, the goal is to empower others to quickly launch new surveys based on proven designs. By understanding the duplication and sharing capabilities within SurveyMonkey, you can significantly reduce the time spent on survey creation, ensuring that best practices and effective question sets are consistently applied across various projects and by different users. This streamlined approach not only saves time but also enhances the overall quality and consistency of your data collection efforts.
