The survey task is truly one of the most useful tasks in Sora. Think about how often the People team needs to collect a piece of data from someone and what you have to go through to get it. All of the manual emails and slack messages, the "just checking in" and "thanks in advance."

Now imagine you didn't need to do that anymore, and Sora could automatically collect the right information from the right person, save it, and use it in the rest of the workflow. That's the beauty of the survey task.

What data the survey is collecting is almost endless. It can be some text, a date, an image or file, a simple "yes" or "no", or even an employee relationship.

That means you can use it to collect responses to a "fun facts" survey that is automatically included in an email introducing a new hire to the team, or it could be a "buddy" survey that you send to an employee's manager for them to select a person's buddy, which will get set in the employee's profile.

Let's take a look at how that last example would work.

First, from the workflow management page, click the "Actions" dropdown and select "Add task template." Now name the task and select the "Survey" task type.

Then under "Survey Questions" create the question. We want to ask "Who is the onboarding buddy?" Now, with surveys we can collect a new data field and the response would be added to the employee's profile, but in this example what we want to do is set an existing field in the employee's profile.

The default data type for a survey question is "Short answer", we want to select that dropdown and change it to "Existing employee field". That will add a new drop-down box underneath, where we can select the existing field we want to map the response to. For this survey, we want to update the "Buddy" field.

Now we simply set the assignee, add any necessary task instructions, set both the trigger and due dates, and then we're all set to click "Create" and add the survey task to our workflow.

‍