Last year, I worked with an organization to launch a big survey of their members. The organization is small, but the survey is big, and they expect to keep doing it annually for many years. We’d planned on using Form Assembly, but the pricing changes there made that impractical. We switched to Formstack. There are definitely some things I prefer about Form Assembly, but it seems like Form Assembly just doesn’t want small customers anymore. We had a very good experience with Formstack’s customer service, which I appreciate. I would recommend it again for a similar project.
The survey data included a lot of information that was unlikely to change much over time (mission statement, for example) and some information that was likely to change regularly (number of staffers.) Because the survey included so many questions, they wanted someone filling it out to have the survey prefilled with the previous year’s answers.
The survey data was generally descriptive of the organization filling out the survey, and that organization was represented by an Account record in Salesforce. In order to make prefilling practical, and to allow easy reporting on the current values for all of the survey questions, we created a lot of new fields on the Account to store this data. We put those fields on a separate tab on the Account Lightning Page.
However, we also wanted to be able to track changes over time to the answers, and to be able to reference any past answers.
We let the Formstack survey update the Account fields directly. We used one field on the Account to indicate the last time the survey had been submitted, and when this field changes, a simple, record-triggered Flow copies those new survey values into a survey history record. The most recent historical record matches the current values on the Account. It took some time to set up, but the rollout was smooth, and the data is good.
Artisanal Data 