Survey Responses vs. Canned Responses

One of most common mistakes made by Spoke users is to mix up the use of survey responses and canned responses when building campaign scripts. Using each feature correctly will ensure that you have easy-to-navigate scripts that log all the data you want to capture. Using them incorrectly may result in loss of data and a frustrating experience for your texters.

Survey Responses

Survey Responses constitute the core building blocks of your campaigns. Creating survey responses in your Interaction Script allows your texters to select a from a menu of survey responses while in a texting conversation, each with it's own prepared script. Once the survey response is selected and sent, the texter is also simultaneously logging data about how that contact responded. In other words, survey responses combine the functions of providing a ready-made script for your texters and logging data about the conversation. Therefore, in order to both log data and make life easier for your texters, the vast majority of your campaign's responses should typically be built into your Interaction Script as survey responses.

For example, if you're asking a Yes/No question in your initial message, then "Yes," "No," and "Maybe" should all be different survey responses. Similarly, if you're gauging support for a candidate using a 1-5 Voter ID score, then you should have five different survey responses, one for each level of support (see example survey response scripts here). Note that in addition to generating useful scripts for your texters, it would be critical to capture the data on how contacts answered these questions.

Canned Responses

Canned Responses constitute a supplemental menu of common answers to common questions that your texters may encounter. Applying a canned response to a conversation does not log any data about that conversation. Therefore, canned responses should only be used to answer questions where you don't care about collecting data. 

Below are some common examples of canned responses. Note that answering these questions would provide the contact with important information, but it wouldn't typically be important to log data indicating that they asked the question.

• Where did you get my information?
• What is {organization_name}?
• How do I check if I'm registered to vote?
• Where is my polling place?