After designing a survey, you are ready to distribute it through a link. A Collector is what generates that link to send to an audience. 

Individual surveys can have one or multiple collectors running at the same time. There is no limit to the number created for Professional subscribers. However, the Basic subscription is limited to three per survey.

One vs. Multiple Collectors:

A benefit of creating multiple collectors is that it enables you to reach different audiences with one survey. With each having their own unique settings, they work independently of one another to enable greater collection control.

However, one collector may be all that you need!

Which Collector Should I Use?

The type you pick determines how the survey is administered. We offer the following options:

• The Web Link: Collect anonymous surveys by posting a link on a website, or email it using your own email.

• The Email Invitation: Track respondents through "unique" links delivered by our mail server.

• The Popup Window: Have a survey or invitation open when people visit your website and collect anonymous responses.

The following three examples in this topic show how you can effectively use collectors:

• Ex 1: Need to track some respondents and keep some anonymous? 
• Ex 2: Want to segment respondents by groups?
• Ex 3: Doing monthly or quarterly tracking over time?

A. You want to survey one group of participants anonymously.

• Create and name one collector as Anonymous using the Web Link type.
• Configure the collector settings and restrictions. 
• Copy and paste the link under the Get Survey Link section into your own email provider's outgoing message or place it on website.
• Save the Collector.

B. Now you want to survey another group and be able to track their identities.

• Create and name a second collector. This time use the Email Invitation option.
• Select the settings and restrictions and save them.
• Import/create your email distribution list.
• Customize the message.
• Schedule the delivery for SurveyMonkey to send out the invitation message with the survey link.

FILTER: As a Professional subscriber, the filter feature enables you to sort your survey by collector. If you want to only see the anonymous responses, then you could sort by the "Anonymous" collector.

A. School: You are an educator and need to survey Student Responses, Teacher Responses, and Administrator Responses. Create a collector for each individual audience. Here you would create three different collectors to send a link to each specific group:

• Student Collector
• Teacher Collector
• Administrator Collector

B. Office:  Your organization has offices worldwide and you want to survey each office separately but still have all the data combined into one results summary. Create the following three collectors:

• Hong Kong Office
• San Francisco Office
• London Office

To create a way to track responses monthly or quarterly, you can also configure this through the use of collectors. You can create your one survey design and then each month or quarter, you will create a new collector.

For example: You survey your audience monthly. You would create 12 collectors with one for each month like:

• January
• February
• March
• and so on

Each collector will have its own link. Every month you will send out the new link to those respondents. All responses will still come into the Analyze section combined. If you want to see only the January responses for example, you can then create your Filter by Collector and choose the "January" collector.