We recently encountered an issue where somebody attempted to send a questionnaire constructed in SurveyMonkey to a number of students and some deliveries were made to the students’ spam folders.
Which is obviously sub-optimal.
Unfortunately we do not fully control how Google decides messages are spams, so we cannot easily ensure that such questionnaires are delivered to everyone’s inbox. SurveyMonkey themselves have some advice on avoiding being dropped into the spam folder.
After thinking about it for some time, a far more reliable method came to mind. It is slightly more work, but should in theory be more reliable for ensuring that everyone gets a chance to fill in your questionnaire.
The answer is when creating your survey is to get a link to the survey rather than simply email it out (the “most popular” option).
This gives you a web site address that will look something like https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/G9K3RQP. You can then write an ordinary email in your Google Mail client explaining what the survey is about and paste in that web site address.
Because it comes from within Google, the mail is somewhat more trusted that emails from outside, so it should be less likely to be filed into the recipient’s spam folder.