Monitoring survey responses helps you keep track of participation and ensure your results are reliable. Your survey’s response rate shows how many people have participated compared to how many people were invited. It’s a quick way to see involvement levels and spots where you might need to communicate or remind participants.
Want tips to increase your survey’s response rate? See How to boost your survey’s response rate.
Understanding response rates
So how is the response rate calculated? It is calculated by dividing the number of completed surveys by the number of invited participants.
Example:
If 80 out of 100 invited employees have responded, your response rate is 80%.
The structure you see when viewing a project or survey's response rate, is defined by your organization’s central or project coordinators when the project is set up. If you notice inconsistencies (for example, incorrect group sizes or missing teams), please reach out to them, so that they can check and correct the employee data in My Effectory if needed.
For a better understanding of group structures, please read our support section articles on group structures.
Two ways to view your response rates
In My Effectory, you can view the response rate:
- Per project – shows participation across all surveys within a project
- Per survey – shows participation for a specific survey
1. Response rate per project
The project-level response rate gives you an overview of participation across all surveys within a project. It is calculated by combining all responses across surveys.
Example:
If a team of 10 people was surveyed twice, the group size will show as 20, and the total number of respondents will be the sum across both surveys.
Where to find the response
- Log in to My Effectory.
- Go to Surveys > Projects and open the project you want to check.
- On the project page, find the Response card and select View response.
What you can do
- View the total participation for the project and a breakdown per group.
- Compare with a benchmark (if available).
- Switch between multiple structures by using the dropdown menu on top of the Response per group section (if your organization uses them). We only show structures that were used as inviting structures in your surveys.
Example:
Suppose your project includes two structures — Organizational structure and Geographical structure. You’ve conducted four surveys: three using the Organizational structure and one using the Geographical structure. If you select Organizational structure in the Response per group overview, you’ll see the combined response rate for the three surveys that used it. Selecting Geographical structure will show the response rate for the single survey that used that structure.
Read more about inviting structures in the article: Understand multiple group structures.
- Filter by time period, survey, or response percentage.
- Search for specific groups by using the search bar.
- Download the current overview as an Excel sheet by clicking on Export
If you scroll down on the project response page, you’ll see a Response per survey section. This gives you a quick overview of the response rates for all surveys within your project. You can also click on a specific survey to go directly to its detailed response overview.
Access
Only Central and Project Coordinators are able to see the response rate of a project.
2. Response rate per survey
The survey-level response rate provides an overview of participation for a specific survey. While a survey is live, response rates are refreshed every 30 minutes, giving you up-to-date insights into participation progress.
Where to find it
- Log in to My Effectory.
- Go to Surveys > All surveys and open the survey you want to check.
- On the survey page, find the Response card and select View response.
What you can do
- View the response rate (only for the inviting structure) and total number of responses per survey
- Compare with a benchmark (if available)
- Filter options (by end date, or response percentage).
- Search for specific groups by using the search bar.
- Download the current overview as an Excel sheet by clicking on Export
Access
- Central coordinators can view detailed response rates for all groups in any survey
- Project coordinators can view detailed response rates for all groups within their assigned projects
- Local coordinators and Results access coordinators can view response rates only for the groups they have access to.
Want to understand coordinator roles and access rights better? Check out these articles:
Sharing you response rate
You can view or embed a response rate widget directly from My Effectory to share participation progress on your intranet or internal dashboards.
- Log in to My Effectory.
- Go to Surveys > All surveys and open the survey you want to check.
- On the survey page, find the Response card and select View response.
- In the upper card Project response click on Share response rate.
- A pop-up window will open where you can Copy a link.
- Share or embed the link - for example on your intranet.
Please note that you can also use the widget on project level. The steps are the same as above.
Downloading your response rate
You can download the response rate as an Excel file at both the project and survey level. The steps are almost the same for both:
- Log in to My Effectory.
- On the project page, find the Response card and select View response.
- On the survey page, find the Response card and select View response.
- Under Response per group you can select a structure (only inviting structure) you’d like to download the response overview for.
- Press Export.
- The download will start automatically in your browser.