What Sensible Surveys is

Sensible Surveys is a survey platform built for wage, benefits, and compensation surveys. Chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, trade associations, and similar groups use it to invite their member businesses to report compensation and benefits data, then share aggregated regional results without ever exposing an individual company’s numbers.

It is designed for surveys where the whole process matters: controlled setup, a defined invitee list, response tracking, automated reminders, privacy protection, and a deliberate results release.

What Sensible Surveys helps you manage

Create a survey in a five-step wizard, starting from a template or from scratch.
Build questions in a full editor: twelve question types, sections, required flags, help text, and conditional logic.
Collect structured compensation data per occupation, with wage ranges, career levels, and hourly or annual units.
Invite respondents manually, by CSV upload, by pasting from a spreadsheet, or by importing a previous survey’s roster.
Track who has not started, who is in progress, and who has submitted, and send automatic reminders.
Review compiled results privately, protected by a safe harbor threshold.
Release results to specific audiences (viewers, survey takers, subscribers) when you decide, and revoke access if needed.
Compare year-over-year trends when a survey is linked to its predecessor.
Apply your organization’s branding to survey pages and emails.

The basic lifecycle

Every survey moves through four stages:

Draft

The survey is being prepared in the setup wizard. You can edit questions, add invitees, and adjust settings. Nothing is visible to takers, and no emails go out. A survey stays a draft until you explicitly launch it, even if its open date has passed.

Running

The survey is live. Invitation emails go out shortly after launch, takers answer and submit, and reminders follow the schedule you configured. Question edits are blocked while a survey is running, but you can extend the close date.

Closed

The close date has passed and takers can no longer submit. Results are still private at this point; nobody outside your team can see anything.

Compiled

Results have been processed and are ready for internal review on the results page. Owners and managers can analyze them, set up filters, preview the released view, and then release access audience by audience.

Release is not a lifecycle stage; it is a separate, per-audience decision you make after the survey closes. See Release results.

Who uses the system

Owners run account-level setup and make final decisions about team access, branding, and release.
Managers operate surveys day to day: build questions, invite takers, monitor progress, and release results.
Survey takers are the business contacts who answer surveys.
Viewers are internal people with read-only access to released results.
Subscribers are external results viewers who purchase or are granted access to specific surveys’ results.

See Roles and permissions for the full breakdown.