A tool for Europe-wide online consultations and surveys

2016.35 EUSurvey

When is this action of interest to you?

You would like to create and conduct multilingual online surveys with easy results analysis. With the user-friendly EUSurvey software (formerly IPM), which supports all steps of the survey process, you can collect any information you need. This open source, free-of-charge, web-based application makes it easier both for respondents to answer the consultations and for survey managers to analyse the results.

What is this action about?

EUSurvey deployed by the European Commission’s Informatics Directorate-General (DG DIGIT) is widely used by the European institutions and in Member States for consulting citizens and businesses and collecting key information needed for the European decision-making process.

The tool enables surveys to be created and answers to be collected via a web-based user interface. It is an open source, multilingual application that is widely accessible and provides support for either identification or anonymity, depending on the survey requirements. The application features all the steps involved in a survey life cycle, such as design, testing, translation, launch, collection of replies and analysis of results. It handles different types of single- or multiple-response questions and free text fields. Results can be displayed as histograms, percentages or in full detail and can be exported to Excel files.

The EUSurvey open source software can be downloaded free of charge on Joinup under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). It can be installed anywhere as a standalone application.

The tool is used by the European Parliament the European Council and the Court of Auditors. It is one of the most popular downloads from the JOINUP software repository.

What are the objectives?

Using the internet to allow both Member State administrations and the EU institutions to better understand the needs of citizens and businesses in a variety of policy sectors.
Making it quicker and easier both for respondents to participate in Europe-wide opinion polls and for policy makers to analyse the results.
Sustaining the service availability of IPM, guaranteeing reliability and efficiency, and providing support to end-users.

What are the benefits?

Readily available service to institutions for creating surveys and managing and collecting answers in policymaking or other contexts.
Helping respondents to answer surveys within the EU policy context or for other purposes. An OSS version can also be deployed on their workstations.

What has been achieved?

New User Dashboard: coming with a lot of helpful widgets that allow the user to continue were stopped, enter directly the editor or the results page of a survey
New graphics and statistics give an overview on the contribution activity of a surveys and its state
Rating element: simple rating feedback on different subjects by clicking on the respective symbol (stars, hearts, circles)
More help and tooltips for users
Redesigned overview page, surveys page, navigation bar, matrices and tables
New translation workflow and states
New question types: Horizontal separator, Comparison question
Increased interoperability capabilities
The web services offer has been increased and more and more operations are now possible using the API, allowing a better integration with an external information system
Integration of EU Survey with the Better Regulation Portal
A specific survey type has been implemented to facilitate the organization of Public Consultation, including predefined mandatory questions, read-only questions, business rules, privileged users and automated integration with the BRP
Performance improvements: scaling of the infrastructure to manage more surveys and contributions (Summertime arrangement consultation: 4.7millions contributions)
Use the new User Interface to develop further additional functionality, suited for mobile access

What are the next steps?

The next steps for EUSurvey are:

Possibility to embed surveys, allowing users to embed EUSurvey questionnaires within their own webpages in order to make our service more reusable and attractive to a larger peer group
Integration with analytics and sentiment analysis tools: standard exporting formats, compatible with statistical analytics tools
Surveys prefilling: Possibility to automatically pre-fill surveys with information and an improved compatibility with Poetry translation management tool
E-Voting mechanism: implementing a system of e-signature and strong authentication
Improve the quiz module: reports, use of formulas to compute results, scoring etc
QR-Code implementation for quick links
Collaborative contributions
New question types and properties: Mixed type matrices, to be able to design more advanced questions, structured answer tree, shared calendar, progress bar, limit the number of contributions, social network integration
WCAG compliancy: Auto check of the compatibility

Case study – What do our users say?

This is a wonderful tool. We have created more than 120 forms since 2005 and the service accompanying this tool is of a very high standard in terms of support, development and user-oriented service. We use it most of the time to enable participants to register for and evaluate our events. The results of the surveys can be exported to Excel files, which is very helpful. More and more colleagues at our Directorate-General are using this tool because of its ease of use (only a small amount of training is required) and very fast set-up. The versions have constantly improved over time and it would be wonderful if that continues. Thanks a lot for this very useful application.

Tram Phuoc, Directorate-General for Regional Policy, European Commission, phuoc.trami@ec.europa.eu.