Running baseline, midline and endline surveys requires careful planning because field teams need clear instructions and donors expect accurate data. You collect information from households across different regions to measure the impact of your development project over time. The baseline establishes your starting point, the midline checks your progress, and the endline measures your final outcomes. The quality of your final report depends entirely on how you structure your questionnaire before a single enumerator goes into the field. A well-designed survey ensures you gather exactly what you need to evaluate your programme at every stage of its lifecycle.
Define your indicators first
Define your project indicators before you build the form. Every question in your survey must map directly to an indicator in your logical framework, which ensures you collect data you will actually use. Field teams spend valuable time on every interview, so you must remove any question that lacks a direct link to a specific report. When you link each data point to an evaluation metric, your final analysis becomes much faster and your enumerators complete more interviews per day. This discipline prevents bloated questionnaires that frustrate respondents and complicate your dataset.
Build the questionnaire
Many M&E teams draft their questions in a spreadsheet during the planning phase. You can import a complete questionnaire from an Excel sheet into formssh in one step, including your grids and logic rules. This import function bridges the gap between your planning documents and the live survey tool. Once the questions are in the system, you can review the flow and ensure the language is clear for your field staff.
When you ask households to rate a list of items against the same set of columns, use a grid question to group them together. Grids save field time because enumerators read the options once and move quickly down the list of household assets, agricultural practices or health services. The respondent understands the pattern, and the enumerator taps the correct column for each row. The analytics dashboard will later display a heat table for these grids, giving you a visual summary of the responses.
Keep the interview focused by using conditional logic to hide follow-up questions until a person gives an answer that needs more detail. If a household falls outside the criteria for a specific section, the enumerator skips those questions and moves straight to the next relevant part. You can also apply number rules to prevent data entry errors in the field. Set a minimum, a maximum and a whole-number rule for questions about age, income or household size to ensure the data stays clean from the moment it is entered.
Manage field data collection
Train your enumerators using the exact same short link they will use in the field. They open the formssh link on any phone or computer, which means they can start collecting data immediately after training. Familiarity with the live form reduces errors during the first few days of the baseline survey. You can also set an accent colour on the form to match your NGO branding, giving the survey an official appearance on the enumerators' screens.
As the fieldwork begins, you need to know if the team is meeting their daily targets across all locations. You can watch the submissions per day in the built-in analytics to check field progress and identify any delays early. The analytics dashboard also shows the median completion time, helping you spot if interviews are taking longer than expected. If you notice a high drop-off rate on a specific question, you can contact your field supervisors to clarify the instructions.
Share reports and export data
Donors and country offices often want to see progress while the survey is still running. You can share a live report link with access control, restricting it to invited members or specific emails so only authorised people view the data. You can also set the link so anyone with the URL can view it, depending on your project confidentiality rules. This gives stakeholders visibility into the project and saves you from compiling manual updates every week. Teammates can also join by email as viewers to monitor the incoming results.
When data collection ends, you export the full dataset to Excel or CSV for your final analysis. The export gives you every response in a structured format, ready for your statistical software or spreadsheet pivot tables. You can then calculate your final indicators and compare your endline data against your baseline figures to measure the total impact of your project. Clean data export means your M&E staff can immediately start analysing results and calculating final metrics.
Start with the Research questionnaire template
If you are setting up a new project, you can use the Research questionnaire template to begin. It includes standard demographic questions, grids and logic rules that you can adapt for your specific logical framework. You can add any of the 14 question types, from dropdowns to date fields, to capture the exact metrics your project requires. You edit the questions to match your indicators and share the link with your field team to start collecting data.