Skip to main content
Go to Surveys ↗ · Opens the webapp — please log in first When your account holds a lot of surveys, you do not have to open each one individually to tidy up or to start a new round. In the survey list you can select several surveys and Activate, Deactivate or Archive them in one step. Before anything happens, you see exactly which surveys will change and which will stay as they are.

​
Starting selection mode

Open the Surveys section. At the top right, next to Create survey, you will find the Edit multiple button. As soon as you click it, the table shows a checkbox in front of every row. Cancel in the same place leaves selection mode again and discards the current selection.

​
Selecting surveys

There are three ways to put a selection together:
  • Individual rows — tick the surveys you want to change.
  • The whole page — the checkbox in the table header (Select all on this page) selects every survey on the page you are currently looking at.
  • Everything matching your filters — once all rows on the page are ticked and there are further pages, Select all 128 matching your filters appears as well (with the actual number). This extends the selection to every survey that matches your filters, including the ones you cannot see right now.
A bar appears above the table showing how many surveys are selected, along with the three actions. Clear selection on the right-hand side undoes the selection.
Changing a filter, searching, moving to another page or changing the number of entries per page resets the selection. You therefore cannot build up a selection across several pages by hand — that is what Select all matching your filters is for.

​
The three actions

The bar offers these three actions and no others: A bulk action follows exactly the same logic as the same action on a single survey. It does nothing you could not also do one survey at a time through the row menu — it just does it for many surveys at once. One choice you have when activating a single survey is missing, though: whether to start a new survey period or extend the last one.

​
Activating always starts a new survey period

When you activate a single, non-recurring survey that has run before, Honestly asks whether you want to Create a new survey period or Extend last survey period. The bulk action does not ask. It always starts a new survey period — as if you had chosen Create a new survey period for every survey. Recurring surveys start in their current or next cycle as usual. For every survey that is activated:
  • All respondents can answer again, including those who already answered in the last period.
  • Everyone assigned to the survey receives an invitation email again.
  • The last period stays as it is, and its results are kept separately. The new period appears as a period of its own in the results.
If you would rather extend the last period, so that people who have not answered yet get more time, activate that survey on its own and choose Extend last survey period. For how to prepare a survey for a new round, see How can I reactivate a survey I have used before?
One-off surveys, meaning surveys that do not recur, have no end date after being activated through the bulk action. They stay open until you deactivate them — individually or with the Deactivate bulk action. If a survey should end at a fixed time, activate it on its own and set the end date there.

​
The confirmation dialog

After you click one of the three actions, a dialog opens that breaks the change down in advance. For archiving it reads, for example:
  • 12 inactive → will be archived
  • 5 active or scheduled → remain unchanged (deactivate first)
  • 3 archived → remain unchanged
Below that you see how many people are assigned to the surveys concerned. For activating it tells you instead how many people will receive an invitation email.
Surveys in the wrong status are skipped, not rejected. If you select 20 surveys and only 12 of them can be archived, Honestly archives those 12 — the other 8 simply stay as they are. The action does not fail because of them.
To confirm, type the number of surveys that will actually change into the field below To confirm, enter the number of surveys that will be changed. The start button only becomes active once the number matches exactly. This extra step protects you from changing a much larger selection than you intended. If not a single one of the selected surveys can be changed, the dialog says so plainly — for example None of the selected surveys can be archived. In that case there is no start button, only Close.

​
What happens after you start

The action runs in the background. The bar above the table shows the progress, for example Archiving … 60%. Honestly then reports the result:
  • 12 surveys archived. — everything worked.
  • 10 surveys archived, 2 failed. — some surveys could not be changed; the rest were processed.
  • Bulk archive failed. Please try again later. — the action could not be carried out.
Selection mode then closes and the list reloads, so you see the new statuses straight away. For very large selections, processing can take longer than the page waits for the result. You then get a message saying the action is still running in the background and that you should refresh the list later. The action is still carried through to the end in that case — there is no need to repeat it.

​
What is only available one at a time

Restore and Delete are not available as bulk actions. You still reach both through the menu at the right-hand end of the relevant row:
  • Restore brings an archived survey back into the active list. To find it, add Archived to the Status filter — archived surveys are not shown by default.
  • Delete removes the survey and all its responses irreversibly. That is why this action is deliberately available for one survey at a time only.