The WordPress Community Team has announced plans to retire CrowdSignal in September 2024 in favor of Jotform for post-event attendee surveys. Automattic-sponsored Community Engagement Specialist Isotta Peira has shared more details about the decision and the future plans.
Why the Change?
CrowdSignal (previously Polldaddy), owned by Automattic, has been used by the community to collect responses, including at large events like WordCamp Europe. However, it has some limitations.
Isotta Peira explained, “We decided to move away from CrowdSignal primarily to address the need for a multilingual solution, ensuring that all attendees worldwide can choose the language in which they complete the survey. This shift allows us to overcome an inclusion barrier that has been a challenge until now.”
Accessibility experts like Alex Stine have previously raised concerns about CrowdSignal’s accessibility, while the WordPress Training Team has reported problems like data capture failures during surveys.
In a Slack conversation, Thijs Buijs, Team Representative of the WordPress Sustainability Team, shared his experience: “The experience we had with the team reps vote for #sustainability is that a lot of votes were not recorded in the backend as well as at front-end. We did not apply any restrictions like ip-limitations etc. I feel sorry to say but the tool appeared to be unreliable even after having tested it multiple times prior to launching the official voting.”
After evaluating various alternatives, the WordPress Community Team identified Jotform as the best tool to meet their needs. “It’s user-friendly, allows easy addition of collaborators, facilitates sharing results while maintaining confidentiality, and includes built-in accessibility checks. This move is a significant step towards more inclusive and effective feedback collection.”, said Isotta Pereira.
Jotform will enable the Community Team to grant organizing team members access as collaborators, allowing them to customize surveys as needed and receive submissions directly.
Implementation Plan
Isotta Pereira outlined the implementation plans: “We will begin with the English Attendee survey for local WordCamps and Events and coordinate the implementation of translations between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. This transition will also include the Organizer post-event Debrief survey and Sponsor surveys if needed. We encourage Flagship WordCamps to adopt this tool so that both organizers and the community team can collect and access responses efficiently.”
For local event organizers, the new WordPress Event Attendee Feedback Survey link will be included in the updated organizer reminder post-event. They can also volunteer to translate the survey into various languages before the official translation initiative begins.
The Community team also appreciates feedback from Flagship organizers about using Jotform and the challenges they anticipate. The team is keen to understand whether standardizing surveys across different Flagships would be beneficial for gathering consistent feedback.
Feedback from the Community
Julia Golomb, Lead Organizer of WordCamp US 2024, commented on the transition: “We’ll try this new tool to survey our attendees… will share this tool with the WCUS co-organizers and together we will adapt it to use for WCUS 2024. I’ll report back on our experience!”
Steve Mosby, WordCamp Europe organizer, also expressed a positive outlook. He said, “If the system can provide a multilingual survey this could support increasing the number of responses – whilst also still providing generic values in the back-end (e.g. Yes/No questions, Enumerated type questions) – this would help with analysis!”
Community members can provide feedback about the transition till September 30, 2024.
