Programming a Survey

The Build Survey workflow is where you’ll design, structure, and customize your survey content inside Glass. This guide walks you through creating a new survey from scratch, understanding the programming interface, and managing your questions and response options.

1. Log in to your Glass account.

2. In the top right corner, click the green “+ New Survey” button.
   A pop-up will appear giving you two choices:

   • Do It Yourself — the most common option for standard surveys.

   • My Template Library — for surveys you or your team have saved as reusable templates.
     

Most users will begin with Do It Yourself. Click Start from Scratch, and the pop-up will update to Create New Survey.

Here, you’ll enter:

• Survey Title – A working name for your project.

• Number of Respondents – Your target sample size (can be changed later).

• Estimated Incidence – Your best guess at the percentage of people who will qualify.

  • Why incidence matters: The estimated incidence helps Glass price your sample and affects fielding speed. Lower-incidence surveys are offered higher respondent incentives to reach niche audiences faster.

When finished, click Create Survey to enter the survey build environment.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see a green navigation bar with two tabs:

• Build Survey – where you program and edit your survey.

• Analyze Results – where you’ll review data once responses begin coming in.
  

On the left-hand panel of the Build Survey tab, there are five icons:

1. Overview

2. Audience

3. Questions

4. Customize

5. Review

For programming purposes, you’ll work almost entirely in the Questions tab.

All new surveys begin with 11 standard demographic questions. These are connected to Glass’ survey-panel partners and are used for demographic targeting and quota management.

You may adjust text or response wording, but changing structure and pre-defined question responses will break the targeting connection and is not recommended. If you prefer different phrasing or response order, make minor text edits carefully — or duplicate and build your own version, which will sit outside of the standard demographic introduction and is not targetable.

Clicking a question in the left hand navigation (for example, “How do you identify?”) opens it in the main panel for editing.

At the top of each question tile, you’ll find:

• Eye Icon - Preview the question.

• Duplicate - Create a copy of the question (including logic, response options, etc)

• Create Template  - Save this question as a reusable template.

• Trash - Delete the question.

• Active Toggle - Activate or inactivate the question. Inactive questions remain in the survey but are not shown to respondents (indicated by a small “” on the sidebar).
  

• Title – The question text shown to respondents.

• Directions (optional) – Smaller subtext such as “Select all that apply” or “Rank your top three choices.”

• Question Type – Choose from single-select, multiple-select, scale, grid, etc.

• Option Type – Switch between Text or Image display.

• Concept Image or Video – Upload an image or video to show between the question text and response options (useful for concept or ad tests).

Each question includes editable response rows:

• Add Option – Inserts a new response line.

• Paste Options – Opens a pop-up to bulk-paste options from another document (Word, Excel, etc.).

Option Features

• Multiple Response – Allows respondents to choose more than one answer.

  • Optionally define minimum and maximum selections.

• Randomize Options – Randomly reorder response options for each respondent.

• Display X of Y – Randomly display only a subset of response options.

• Carry Forward – Pull response options from a previous question (e.g., “items you selected above”).

Question Features

• Pipe Concept – Reuse an image or video shown earlier, ideal for monadic or sequential testing.

• Quotas – Limit how many respondents can select a specific response.

• Display Logic – Show or hide this question based on earlier responses.
  
  

Next to each response option, you’ll see a gear icon.

The gear menu varies by question type but commonly includes:

• Display Logic – Control whether a specific response appears for certain respondents (e.g., only males, only 18–34).

• Use Weight – Apply numeric weights when calculating averages in Crosstabs or Exports. Helpful for automated NPS or weighted-sum scoring.

• Free Text – Converts the response into a text-entry field (“Other, please specify”).

• Is Active – Toggle to deactivate a response without deleting it (shows a red “Inactive” tag when response option is inactivated).

• Anchor – Locks the response position when randomization is on (useful for “None of the above” or “Other, specify” options you don’t want to randomize).

• Exclusive – Ensures mutually exclusive behavior within multi-select questions (e.g., Making “None of the above” exclusive means it cannot be chosen with other options).

Pro Tip: Use "Anchor" + "Exclusive" together for “None of the above” or “Other” responses to keep logic clean and respondent experience clear.

Always Save Question before navigating away or creating a new one- if you make a change, you will be prompted to save your changes if you move on without pressing ‘Save question’