Making surveys anonymous

Snap offers you various options in terms of anonymising your survey data, from running anonymous surveys with no personal data submitted to WebHost, to being able to identify if a respondent has responded but not linking them to their response, to removing identifiers from the data after collection so that your further processing is on anonymised data only.

If you want your survey to remain anonymous, here are the things you should do:

  • Don’t ask respondents for personally identifiable data such as email address, name etc.
  • Don’t add a database of respondents to your survey in Snap

To deploy your survey you can:

  • Put the link to the survey in places where your respondents will have access to it, for example your website, intranet or on posters
  • Print a paper version and leave it in relevant places

How to find the link for your survey:

  1. Log in to Snap WebHost
  2. Click on your survey
  3. You will find the URL of your survey in the Summary tab, this can be inserted into webpages as an hyperlink or on printed material as a QR code

If you want to deploy a survey where you contact a respondent in your database you have three options:

Finally, if you want to anonymise your survey after carrying it out, you can remove personal data from the data file. See our worksheet: Anonymising data after carrying out your survey

When you use Snap WebHost to collect survey responses, it will not collect the respondent’s IP address in conjunction with the survey response. As explained in our Privacy Policy (https://www.snapsurveys.com/survey-software/privacy-policy-uk/ ) Snap Surveys separately records respondent IP addresses and other technical information in its backend logs, which it deletes after no longer than 6 months. This technical information is not linked to survey response data and is not shared with customers.