Use an instrument in your network
Hosted collection is free for Independent Living organizations. Here is what you get, what we keep, and what you have to decide before you field.
How it works
- Tell us who you are. Use the contact form: organization, state, which instrument, and the partners or places you want to track separately (each Center, each county, each flyer, each event).
- We set up your organization and your channel codes. A channel code is a short word on the end of a link, such as
?c=kauai-flyer. Each one gives you a count of its own, so you learn which outreach worked. The link for your state looks likeildata.org/s/community-needs/xx/?c=your-code, wherexxis your state. - You review the live instrument with a screen reader user. We do not open a channel for fielding until your organization has done this, or has accepted our most recent pass in writing. A disability council publishing a survey no screen reader user has worked through is the one outcome worse than being a few days late.
- You field. QR codes should point straight at the instrument address with its code, not at a landing page, or the code is lost on the first click. Paper responses are keyed by your staff under the channel code of that batch.
- You export. Your admin page shows counts by channel, county and day, and exports two files: answers (one row per response, one column per question, no contact details) and follow-up requests (the contact details respondents chose to give, with the response id, nothing else).
What is stored, and what is not
- Stored: the answers, the instrument version, the channel code, the county if asked, the time of each save, and a random response id. Contact details, if given, in a separate table keyed by that id.
- Not stored: IP addresses, browser fingerprints, names attached to answers, anything about pages visited elsewhere. There is no analytics script on the survey pages.
- Who can see it: the people your organization names, after signing in with a one-time code sent to their email. ILDATA.org staff can see it to operate the service and will not publish or share it.
- How long: until your organization asks for deletion, or two years after the channel closes, whichever is first. You can export at any time.
The full terms are in the privacy notice, which is also what respondents see on the consent screen.
Decide these before you field
- Incentives. The instruments promise none. If you offer a gift card or a raffle, confirm it is permitted under your funding and your state's rules first, and tell us so the consent screen says so.
- Who the named reviewer is. Someone on your side should own the data: who downloads it, who sees follow-up requests, who answers a respondent who asks for their answers to be removed.
- Response targets by county. Decide how many responses you need from each county before you start, using the county disability population on your state's Census page. Targets never close the survey; they tell you where to do more outreach.
- Languages and formats. Offer the plain-text master to your translator and your braille transcriber. Keep the answer values exactly as written so translated responses pool with the rest.
Or run it yourself
Everything here is open. The instrument definitions are JSON files, the page templates and the collection service are in the repository, and the response format is documented. A state IT team can host the same instruments on its own domain and still produce data that pools with everyone else's.