Following last month’s SurveyOptic update, here is the next battch of new developments. It might be the summer, but the SocialOptic team haven’t slowed down, with dozens of new features, as well as bringing extra layers of security hardening and performance optimisation to the platform. The main focus was across three key areas:
- Expanding language accessibility for diverse populations
- Deepening intelligence for longitudinal survey programmes
- Giving administrators more direct control over automations
Here is what these changes mean in detail.
Language & Accessibility: Speak Your Respondents’ Language
What Are We Solving?
Large-scale staff and stakeholder surveys often serve highly diverse populations. In the public sector and beyond, from NHS trusts to government departments and universities, inclusivity is not just a nice-to-have; it is a legal requirement. When respondents cannot access a survey in their own language, response rates drop, and that also means data quality suffers. Organisations miss the voices they often most need to hear.
SurveyOptic has long supported a large core set of languages, but we have significantly widened the range so that more respondents can participate without barriers.
What’s New
33 additional languages are now available across three coordinated releases:
- Nordic languages: Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål), Finnish, and Icelandic.
- EU and Baltic languages: Greek, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Irish, and Maltese.
- High-demand community languages: Tamil, Pashto, Dari, Tigrinya, Amharic, Vietnamese, Malayalam, Oromo, Sinhala, Thai, Indonesian, Serbian, Bosnian, Scottish Gaelic, Igbo, Afar, and (European) Portuguese.
Notably, Pashto and Dari are right-to-left languages, which the interface handles automatically. Several of these additions target high-demand UK community languages used by newly arriving communities, making it easier for public-sector organisations to meet their inclusivity obligations.
Respondent portal auto-translation. If you aren’t familiar with the Respondent portal, this is a special part of the survey interface for secure surveys and applications. It complements the standard respondent interface by providing a full user registration flow, password protected surveys, self-service password management, and a place for respondents to manage multiple applications, forms and surveys as well as a place for them to monitor the process of their applications. It already powers a number of government services, and has applications with our commercial customers as well – it even connects with our payments integration.
The respondent portal now automatically detects a user’s browser language and presents a localised interface to them. Respondents can still override the language and locale selection manually, but the default experience is now friction-free for non-English speakers. It means that they no longer have to land on an English page and hunt for language controls in an unfamiliar language.
In-app translation editing. Translation managers can now edit language strings directly in the SurveyOptic interface, without exporting a CSV file, editing it externally, and re-importing it. This shortens turnaround times for corrections from hours to minutes, and removes the file-handling risks that come with spreadsheet round-trips.
Why This Matters
When respondents can read instructions, navigation, and questions in their own language, they answer more accurately and complete more often. For organisations running national surveys or patient-experience programmes, these 33 languages remove a structural barrier that has historically pushed certain communities to the margins. For administrators, the in-app editing means translation adjustments can happen in real time, so no waiting for system or server updates or file exports.
Longitudinal Surveys: Keeping Recurring Programmes on Track
What Are Longitudinal Substitutions?
Monthly and recurring survey programmes, such as rolling staff-experience or patient-experience cycles rely on respondents completing the right form at the right time. When someone misses a month, or opens the wrong period’s survey, data ends up in the wrong bucket. Survey administrators need a way to guide respondents contextually, without manual edits or complex instructions.
What’s New
Previous-response substitution variables. There are a number of new built-in substitutions for longitudinal workflows. Administrators can use these to show contextual warnings. For example, if a respondent opens June’s form but never submitted May’s, the survey can display a gentle notice: “There were no minutes submitted for May. Please check you are completing the correct month’s form.” This prevents data-quality issues and support requests. The substitutions can also be use to tailor repeating surveys dynamically, which supports engagement and makes it easy to identify what people are working on.
Audience approvals. Changes to audiences, these are the distribution lists used for invite-based surveys and research panels, can now flow through the same approval workflow already used for survey changes. This prevents accidental or unauthorised modifications to distribution lists, which is critical in regulated environments where roster integrity is audited.
Why This Matters
Longitudinal programmes only work if each period’s data is cleanly separated. The new substitution variables give administrators a lightweight, automated way to keep respondents in the right month, reducing the support burden and improving dataset reliability. Audience approvals add governance to the “who gets invited” layer, closing a gap that mattered particularly for NHS and other regulated settings, so you have an audit trail of who was invited to each month’s survey.
Workflow Automation: Test with Confidence
Why Workflow Testing Matters
Automated workflows handle the repetitive backbone of survey programmes: sending invitations, triggering reminders, closing collection periods, and routing notifications. But workflows are only trustworthy if you can verify them before they touch live data. Previously, testing complex logic meant waiting for scheduled triggers or manipulating system time — both slow and risky.
What’s New
Workflow test runs. You can now trigger any workflow job manually from the workflow editor. When you run a job this way, delay and timing conditions are ignored, so you see the results immediately. This lets you verify logic before going live, or re-run a failed job for error recovery without waiting for the next scheduled trigger.
Why This Matters
Workflow builders can now iterate with confidence. A complex multi-step automation can be stepped through on demand, checked for errors, and corrected before it reaches respondents. And when something does go wrong, manual re-run means recovery in minutes rather than days.
Plus: Security Hardening and Faster Operations
Behind the scenes, the month included several important security and performance updates. I think even people outside of the security sector have probably read about how AI is providing both challenges and opportunities for information security. Like many providers, we are working with the latest tools to strengthen our security even further, and are also updating software as new forms of attack are identified and mitigated. As part of this work, our TOTP two-factor authentication has been hardened across all platform services, based on a number of emerging threats and evolving best practice.
For performance, completion rates now calculate more efficiently, especially for completion reports in highly complex organisational hierarchies and in large populations. As well as speeding up the user experience, this reduces server use and so reduces CO2, so both our users and the planet benefit. We will have some more to say about that next month.
Coming Up
Look out for further refinements to audience management, dashboard capabilities, and the respondent experience as we move through August.
Questions? Find us at support@socialoptic.com or in the chat.