i Heads up! This is not the latest version. Check our newest version for SharePoint online

How to: Use SurveyMonkey to collect feedback in Employee Training Management

With Employee Training Management you can collect feedback after a training event. If configured, the solution sends an email notification to all attendees including a link to a feedback form.

Feedback notification

The feedback form is usually a list in SharePoint, but of course it’s also possible to use different feedback services, for example SurveyMonkey.

In this article I will explain how to configure it to use SurveyMonkey, but you can also use the same approach for other services.

How does the feedback notification work?

First let’s take a look at the feedback email template and especially at the included link (Scheduled Training Events/List Settings/Employee Training Management settings). The best way to change the template is to use ‘Edit HTML Source’.

configure Feedback e-mail template

Here you see that a placeholder is used for the URL, the ‘Link to the feedback form’ column with the internal column name ‘etmFeedbackfromURL’. This placeholder will be replaced with the value from the ‘Link to the feedback form’ column or the default value, if the column is empty.

If we take a look at the column definition, we see that the default value is set to: Lists/Feedbacks/NewForm.aspx?Training={ID}

Feedback column default value

By default this column is not visible in the training event form, meaning that the solution always uses the default value and we have the same feedback link for each event. If you want to configure a different feedback form per event, add it to the ‘Training’ content type and let the organizer enter the feedback form URL.

Feedback column in form

If you have the same form for all training events, it’s important to add the Training={ID} parameter to the query string. {ID} will be replaced with the ID of the training event and this will select the correct training event if a user provides feedback.

Feedback form in SharePoint

How can we change it to use SurveyMonkey?

First we have to create the feedback form using SurveyMonkey.

When the form is completed, SurveyMonkey proves a web link similar to this one:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FVSFSXP

If you use this link as the default value of the ‘Link to the feedback form’ column, Employee Training Management will use this as the default feedback form. In this case, you need to allow multiple responses in the SurveyMonkey configuration.

If you want to use different forms for different events, please add the column to the new form as described above and let organizers enter the URL to the SurveyMonkey form.

When designing the feedback form using SurveyMonkey, you can also add custom variables to track data about the training event like ID, Title or Event Date. Learn more about custom variables here.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FVSFSXP?TrainingID={ID}&TrainingTitle={Title}

SurveyMonkey feedback form

Please note that you can only use SurveyMonkey with the latest version of the Employee Training Management (6/28/2016). Here you can always download the latest version: sapiens.at.setup.etm.zip

If you don’t have a license yet, here you can get a trial: Employee Training Management

If you have any questions of feedback regarding Employee Training Management, please send an e-mail to support@sharepointsapiens.com or leave a comment.