Seeking Guidance on Distributing and Embedding Surveys in NMI Newsletter Recipients and eHealth Forum

[karenshaw]

Hi @NathanK and the other @moderators,

Hope this finds you well and happy. There were a couple of questions arose from todays @NMI-exec meeting and we wondered if you can help.

1. The group wants to know how we can find out who receives the NMI monthly newsletter? We want to send out a survey to current recipients and want to know how to do this efficiently?

2. Can we embed or build the survey into eHealth forum and get the results out of it easily for analysis? It will be a mix of radio button type choices and free text fields.

Thanks for your help.

Kind regards
Karen

[NathanK (Nathan Kershaw)]

@karenshaw

1. The group wants to know how we can find out who receives the NMI monthly newsletter? We want to send out a survey to current recipients and want to know how to do this efficiently?

The NMI monthly newsletter (hinz-nmi-newsletter) is produced as a slightly hacky template within the eHealth Forum. Once complete, it is ‘published’ to #ciln:nmi.

As the entire @NMI group is set to be Watching that tag, they are all sent a notification when this is done. If they have their email preferences set so that they get emails for these (this is the default), then they will receive the newsletter as an email notification.

So basically all 255 nursing and midwifery members of the eHealth Forum (i.e. @NMI) should receive it. The true number will of course be somewhat less as some will have opted out of emails, no longer have access to the email they registered with, have it going straight to their spam folder, etc, etc.

If someone would like to dive deeper, and perhaps chase the ‘lost’ souls, I’d be delighted to support them in this.

@karenshaw

Can we embed or build the survey into eHealth forum and get the results out of it easily for analysis? It will be a mix of radio button type choices and free text fields.

Yes - here is an example survey that I whipped up as a demo for @NAHSTIG-council last year produced with the Custom Wizard Plugin:

https://ehealthforum.nz/w/nahstig-council-eoi

It isn’t as user-friendly as dedicated tools like Survey Monkey, but does the job nicely and means that you can utilise existing data from the eHealth Forum database to supplement it (e.g. email address, engagement, profession, membership of groups, etc).

We can also do simple polls embedded in a Topic (such as the Newsletter) - these can be quite sophisticated. There is also a new/experimental plugin which allows a survey to be embedded into a Topic; however, free text answers will need to be accommodated somehow.

Here is an overview about the tools available:

Surveys and Polls (in the eHealth Forum)

Overview There are many situations where you might want to gather data from people within the eHealth Forum, such as: EOI for a committee or group quickly gauge the opinions on an issue improve the information you have about your members We have several ways of doing this within the eHealth Forum, and they each have strengths and weaknesses. From simplest to most complex: Polls Surveys (internal) External forms or survey software Polls These are perfect for simple questions. They can be ‘m…

[karenshaw]

@NathanK if the group wanted to use an MS Forms form to collect data to make it easy to build, complete and analyse could we embed a link in a post on ehealth Forum? Just thinking of time, learning curves and usability.

[NathanK (Nathan Kershaw)]

I think that they are just simple links - so that should be dead easy.

Personally, I find that the greatest challenge with survey platforms is actually the content:

1. What questions are you going to ask
2. How are you going to ask them
3. How you are going to analyse it
4. Presenting the findings.

As is often the case, the IT bit is actually the easiest. As long as the data is secure, accessible, and usable, all good. Do be aware that those things can easily be compromised with a 3rd party platform, however.