As part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), all organizations must have a documented, lawful basis for processing personal data.
If you decide to use consent as the basis for collecting and processing survey response data, you will need to provide potential respondents with the relevant information so that they can give informed consent before proceeding with a survey.
How to include a consent question in your survey
One of the simplest ways to obtain a respondent’s informed consent to collect and process their personal data is by including a specific question at the start of a survey. There are a few things to consider when adding a consent question to your survey:
Include a privacy notice
To ensure potential respondents can give informed consent, you could include a privacy or information notice as part of the first question, or provide a summary and link to your full privacy policy.
This notice should inform respondents about all aspects of the survey project; how and for what purpose their data will be used. If you are going to use the response data for more than one purpose, then you may want to set up multiple consent questions.
Make the consent question mandatory
By setting the consent question up as a mandatory question, you can prevent potential respondents from proceeding with the survey if they haven’t given you consent to collect and process their personal data.
Keep a record of consent
You need to have a thorough record of the consent to use your respondents’ personal data, so that you can provide evidence if required.
Including a consent question in Snap Survey Software
When you create a survey in Snap Survey Software, it’s possible to add a mandatory consent question, which provides respondents with the relevant information for them to give their informed consent. If a respondent chooses not to give their consent then they will be unable to complete the survey, and you won’t have access to their personal data.
We’ve put together a useful worksheet to take you through the process of setting up a consent question in a survey. The worksheet shows you how to add the consent question and provide the required information, as well as setting a response as mandatory. You’ll also learn how to export consent responses for your records.
The GDPR applies only to personal data; the obligations under GDPR do not apply to anonymous data. Snap Surveys offers several options to anonymize your surveys, including the option to run anonymous surveys using Snap WebHost. Find out more about anonymizing surveys here.
Snap Surveys recognizes its responsibility to help our clients meet their GDPR obligations when using our software and services. This worksheet is part of our GDPR series, which gives detailed guidance on topics such as obtaining consent within surveys, providing opt outs, and anonymization. You can find these worksheets in our Support Hub, and more information about GDPR and the Snap WebHost here.
