While you can create any ballot without using Q&A Components at all, this powerful feature makes certain types of ballots with repeating questions, or repeating choices for different questions, must faster and easier to create and to edit.  

Here are two examples where Q&A Components are useful:

• Create a set of choices that will be used to respond to different questions:  You may want to use the same set of choices for multiple questions.  For example, a bar association may want to ask how many lawyers are in the local office of the voter's firm, and separately, how many lawyers are in the voter’s entire firm.  Those choices could be "Fewer than 10," "11 to 25," "26 to 100," and "More than 100."  If that set of four choices is put into a Q&A Component, you can easily select it each time those choices fit the question you're asking.  Now imagine you're asking to be give voters more choices to respond to that question.  Without a Q&A Component, you will need to edit each of those questions.  WIth a Q&A Component, you would just edit the choices in the Q&A Component and all of the questions that use those choices would be automatically updated.  If you create this type of Q&A Component, when you edit a question’s type in the ballot, this Q&A Component will appear as a “type” of question you can ask.
• You can create a list of questions: If you created a survey to evaluate a number of individuals on the same metrics, you could asssemble a set of those questions as a Q&A Component.  For example, a bar association conducting a judicial evaluation may evaluate many judges using the same set of questions.  By using a Q&A Component, if you decide to modify the questions being used throughout the ballot before you launch the poll, you would just edit those questions in the Q&A Component.  All of those questions would be automatically updated throughout your ballot.

Enabling Q&A Components

To enable these features, go to the Questions tab of your poll, and click on Ballot Options (the gear icon).  Select “Advanced” under the Features dropdown, and click Accept.  (Note: Only Gold and Platinum subscription plans have access to Advanced Ballot Features.)

Once Advanced Ballot Features are enabled, you will see a Q&A Components section within the ballot designer, above "page 1" of your ballot.

If you click Add a Q&A Component, you will see this:

Creating a List of Questions

If you want to use a Q&A Component to create a List of Questions, which you'll use more than once in your ballot, select that option.  Be sure to change the default name of the component (shown as "Question 1" below) to something meaningful, and then Add Question to List. 

Once you've set up your List of Questions, you can go to a ballot page, and when you add a "question" to that page, select the list of questions you created.  BallotBox will insert the full list of questions on that page.

In the image below, which is from our Judicial Evaluation template, the four questions that are being asked about each Associate Judge is one "LIst of Questions" Q&A Component.  By creating the ballot that way, if we decided to adjust the wording of those questions, editing them in the Q&A Component woudl modify them throughout the ballot. 

Creating a List of Choices

To use Q&A Components to create a list of choices, instead of selecting List of Questions, select a question type.  In the example below, we have created the "number of lawyers" list of choices that was described in the hypothetical at the top of this article:

Now we can use that Q&A Component on a ballot page.  Here, we have already created the Local Office Size question, and we are creating the Total Firm Size question:

Tip:  A great way to see how Q&A Components can make designing and editing ballots much easier is to create a new poll, import our template for Judicial Evaluations, and review how they are used there.

Tip: Like other Advanced Ballot Features, Q&A Components are only available to customers who also have turn-key support from BallotBox personnel.  You do not ever have to become an expert in Q&A Components.  We are happy to configure your ballot for you.