Limit who can access this survey

Some surveys are sensitive, for example leadership, HR, or executive surveys. Limit who can access this survey keeps a survey private so it is not visible to other administrators in your organisation by default, while still letting you hand access to the specific people who need it.

What it does

When you turn it on:

• The survey is hidden from other administrators in your organisation. They cannot manage it or see its results.
• You (the person who created the survey) always keep full access.
• Anyone you add to the list keeps access too, based on their normal role. For example, an account manager you add gets account-manager access.

When it is off, the survey behaves normally and follows your organisation's usual access rules.

When to use it

Use it for surveys where the results should not be visible to every administrator by default, such as:

• Leadership or 360 feedback surveys
• HR or people-and-culture surveys
• Executive or board surveys

How to turn it on

1. Open the survey and go to the Settings tab.
2. Switch on Limit who can access this survey.
3. Under Hide this survey from everyone except, search for and add the people who should keep access. You can leave it empty if only you and super admins should have access.

You can turn it on or off while the survey is in draft or pending.

Who you can add

You can add account managers, account admins, and survey administrators. These are the roles the survey would otherwise be hidden from, so they are the people it makes sense to give access back to. Each person keeps the access their role normally allows.

If you want someone to have a limited, view-only look at the results instead, use Report Viewer permissions.

How this is different from Report Viewer permissions

This is the key distinction, and it is worth getting right.

• Adding someone to the access list in the Settings page gives full, role-based access. Someone you add is treated as if the survey were not hidden from them, so they get whatever their role normally allows, such as managing the survey and seeing all results. You can only add administrators here: account managers, account admins, and survey administrators.
• Report Viewer permissions give a limited, view-only look at the results. You choose exactly which reports, filters, and questions each person can see, and a Report Viewer can be anyone you have added as a user.

An example

Imagine you are running a confidential leadership survey and you turn on "Limit who can access this survey". By default, only you can now see and manage it.

• Aroha is an account manager who is helping you run the survey. You add her to the access list. She can now manage the survey and see all of its results, exactly as she could on a normal survey.
• Carlos is another account manager who would normally have access to every survey, but who should not be involved in this sensitive one. You simply leave him off the access list. Because the survey is hidden from other administrators by default, Carlos can no longer see or manage it at all. If you later decide he should be able to view the results without managing the survey, set him up as a Report Viewer instead of adding him to the access list.
• Ben is a team leader who should only see his own team's results, and nothing else. You leave him off the access list and set him up as a Report Viewer restricted to his team. He gets a view-only report for his team alone, and cannot see anyone else's results or manage the survey.

Notice that Ben is a team leader (a regular user) rather than an administrator, so he could not be added to the access list anyway. Report Viewer permissions are the right tool for someone like him.