A good questionnaire takes shape before you add the first question: with a clear goal and a well-thought-out structure. Here you will learn how to create an online questionnaire in five steps that delivers useful answers, and how LamaPoll supports you along the way.
Table of Contents
Five steps to your online questionnaire
- Set your goal: Be clear about what you want to find out and which decision the results should inform. Every question should serve this goal. Setting survey goals: expert tips
- Plan the structure: A questionnaire consists of an introduction, a main section and a closing section. Start with easy questions and leave sensitive topics until the end. Questionnaire structure
- Write the questions: Keep questions short, clear and neutral, and offer a complete set of answer options. The most common mistakes Question types at a glance
- Design and test: Adapt the design to your organisation and try the questionnaire out with a few test respondents before sending it. Design your questionnaire Conduct a pretest
- Send and analyse: Invite participants by link or email and follow the results in real time.
Our guide How to create a questionnaire shows you how to put these steps into practice in LamaPoll.
Get started faster with templates: Tried-and-tested questionnaire templates are available for many occasions, such as customer or employee surveys. You will find them here on our website and directly in the tool, and you can use them free of charge and adapt them to your needs.
Browse the free questionnaire templates
All the tips in one handy document: Creating a questionnaire (PDF, in German)
Creating questionnaires: why LamaPoll?
More than 10,000 organisations from business, public administration, research, education and associations, as well as many private individuals, create their questionnaires with LamaPoll.
We have been developing LamaPoll together with our customers since 2007. The result: easy operation, a professional range of features and 100% data protection made in Germany, at fair prices.
Your benefits:
- Your own corporate design: logo, colours and fonts, right down to your own CSS
- Straight in your browser: no installation, no programming skills
- Maximum security: audited by the BSI, certified to ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018, plus TISAX
- 100% data protection: GDPR-compliant, hosted exclusively in Germany
- Real-time results with charts and cross-tabulations
- 100% responsive: optimised for smartphone, tablet and PC
Who is LamaPoll for?
LamaPoll handles simple surveys just as well as complex studies:
- Companies create questionnaires in their own corporate design for customer surveys and employee surveys.
- Research institutes carry out and analyse highly complex surveys.
- Media create educational or entertaining questionnaires, such as an IQ test or a quiz.
- Private individuals ask others to rate name ideas for their baby, for example.
One piece of software for companies, researchers and private individuals alike? That works because LamaPoll combines an extensive range of features with an interface that is intuitive to use.
The following video shows you how to set up your first survey.
Questionnaires in your own corporate design
A logo and a background colour do not make a corporate design. It also includes fonts, colours, shapes and your visual language. You can reproduce all of this in LamaPoll:
- Quick: just upload your logo and you are done.
- Detailed: adjust the layout, colours, fonts, shapes, icons, images and videos in the design settings.
- Complete freedom: edit the CSS yourself and create a 100% individual questionnaire.
More on designing questionnaires
100% security & protection
Your questionnaires contain work, valuable knowledge and often the personal data of hundreds or thousands of people. That is why LamaPoll protects this data with measures that go beyond the legal requirements, and has them checked independently on a regular basis.
- Audited by the BSI, certified to ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018 (TÜV SÜD), plus TISAX
- Backups several times a day, internal and external
- Redundant systems in data centres in Germany
- Encrypted transmission (TLS), IP addresses are only processed in hashed form
All measures and certificates at a glance: Security at LamaPoll
Questionnaires & data protection: the GDPR, the world’s strictest
100% data protection with LamaPoll:
You can upload the email addresses of 2,000 employees together with attributes (department, level of education, gender, perhaps even address) to LamaPoll and be 100% protected, both legally and technically. So you can go to bed at night without a knot in your stomach. The legal basis is a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR.
- LamaPoll stores your data on ISO-certified dedicated servers: no cloud, no back doors.
- Full control: We process your data solely to run your survey and never use it for our own purposes or for AI training.
- All data is stored in the Federal Republic of Germany and is subject to the German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) and the GDPR, among other laws.
Still not sure? Here is an example from the US perspective to show the contrast.
In the European Union, the protection of personal data is a fundamental right. In the US, on the other hand, self-regulation applies instead of the law. To put it loosely: theft is legally allowed, but everyone is supposed to promise not to steal.
Rest assured: according to the case law of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, data protection is a fundamental right, and our servers are located exclusively in Germany. We explain what applies to data transfers to the US on our page Data processing in the USA.
Create an anonymous online questionnaire
With LamaPoll, anonymous does not mean doing without convenience. Even in an anonymous survey, you can invite participants personally, send targeted reminders or offer incentives.
This works because personal details such as names are only inserted into invitations and reminders via placeholders and are never stored with the answers. The survey creator cannot see who receives a reminder. Contact details, for example for a prize draw, can be collected separately from the results using the separate analysis option.
To find out what to bear in mind with anonymous surveys, see Participant anonymity. If you have any questions, we are happy to advise you.
Well thought out down to the last detail
It is often the little things that make software a chore. Because we have been developing LamaPoll based on customer feedback for years, many of them were solved long ago. A few examples:
- Participants can simply click the answer text instead of aiming precisely at small circles and boxes.
- You can link the progress bar to the number of pages or questions, or hide it altogether.
- Questionnaires can be archived and categorised.
The best way to see for yourself: getting started is free.
