Configuring third-party surveys

Assign users the survey portal user role and create notification contacts for the Survey Portal Surveys issue type.

When you configure a third-party survey, take note of the following requirements:
  • Third-party organizations for survey purposes must be configured as locations.
  • The region of a location cannot be blank. Blank regions are automatically set to Earth. Check whether you have any locations set to Earth by filtering the Locations grid based on Earth. Alternatively, the Organization Summary page shows you if you have locations set to Earth. Various features do not work if the region of a location is set to Earth.
  • As a best practice, create groups to represent third-party locations. For example, if a third party organization is a supplier, you might add the organization to a group called Suppliers. If the third-party organization is a portfolio company or investee, you might add them to a group called Investment Portfolio. Then, within that level 1 group, you might categorize your third-party locations into sub groups (level 2 or even level 3). For a supply chain, you might group suppliers by industry or product type. If you capture qualitative data only in third-party surveys, or you do not link any survey questions to accounts, then you might use a portfolio group as no data from the survey is used for enterprise sustainability reporting. If survey questions are linked to accounts and that data is part of your enterprise sustainability reporting (for example, data for scope 3), then the group must be a classification group. For more information about creating groups, see Setting up groups.
Important: For the survey response of a location to be included in the survey dataset, the location must be part of a classification group structure. For more information, see Survey data set.
Note: A maximum of 200 locations can be selected in a request responses action. As a best practice, organize locations into groups of 200 or less locations. Then, when you request a response, you can select the group and select All locations.

Setting up Survey Portal users

The high-level steps are as follows:
  1. Create a location-level user for each third-party organization. Each user is assigned the Survey Portal user role. The user is the person in the third-party organization who is responsible for completing the survey.
    Note: The recommendation is to use the email address of the user so that is easier to communicate login details to third-party users.
    For more information, see Setting up users.
  2. Create a notification contact for each third-party organization. The location level portal user at each of these locations is set up as the assignee for the issue type Survey Portal Surveys. You need to configure the assignee only for issue type Standard as the issues that are automatically created when survey responses are created will be of priority Standard. Watchers are not relevant for this alert class.
Note: Because the Issue Tracking tool is used to manage the workflow of survey responses, any user who needs to change the status of issues must be assigned the Issue Manager work role.