Picture a school district with eight schools. A few years ago the district office built a school climate questionnaire, and each principal made a copy of it: one wanted the school's crest on the printed form, another added a question about the new lunch schedule, a third listed the answers from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree" instead of the other way round. Most schools hand the form out on paper in class, and two share a web link instead. Every copy works perfectly on its own.
Then the school board asks two simple questions. How are students doing across the district, and which school needs support first? Suddenly there are eight surveys, eight exports, and someone in a spreadsheet lining up columns by hand, guessing whether "I feel safe at school" in one file is the same question as "I feel safe in my school building" in another.
That is the job Multi-survey analysis, new in PaperSurvey.io, was built for. You pick the surveys, link the questions they share, and get one set of results across all of them, with paper and web responses side by side and every new response included as it arrives.
Why Results End Up Split Across Surveys
Nobody sets out to scatter their data. It happens for good reasons:
- One copy per site. Each school, store, office or field site gets its own survey so it can print its own forms, add a local question or keep its own responses apart.
- One copy per class or instructor. Course evaluations are often duplicated for every teacher or section.
- One copy per year. An annual survey gets copied for the new wave, and the wording drifts a little each time.
- One copy per event. A festival, conference or training series runs the same feedback form under a new name every time.
Each copy answers its own question well. The trouble starts when you need the big picture, or want to compare the copies against each other.
How Other Survey Platforms Handle It
This is a common need, and the major survey platforms each have an answer to it, so it is worth being fair about what exists.
SurveyMonkey has a feature with the same name, Multi-survey analysis, launched in 2024: you add surveys to a dashboard, similar questions are matched, and the results appear together. Alchemer offers Cross-Survey Reporting, which builds one report from questions in different surveys, alongside a Combine Results option for identical surveys. Qualtrics has no single named feature for this; teams combine surveys through dashboard data mapping, by using multiple data sources in advanced reports, or by importing responses into one survey. Google Forms and Microsoft Forms keep each form's responses separate, and the usual workaround people describe is pulling every form's responses into one spreadsheet, by export, formula or automation, and lining up the columns by hand.
All of these are built around responses collected on a screen. If every one of your sites collects online, any of them can do the job. If some of your sites hand out paper, that is where the picture changes.
How Multi-Survey Analysis Works in PaperSurvey.io
1. Choose the surveys. On the Surveys page, tick the surveys you want to analyze together, or tick a folder to include every survey in it and its subfolders. Open Bulk actions and choose Combine for analysis, then give the analysis a name. You do not always have to go looking: when you open the results of a survey that has similar surveys, PaperSurvey shows how many questions they share and offers an Analyze together button to anyone with editing access. One multi-survey analysis can include up to 200 surveys.
2. Link the questions they share. PaperSurvey compares every question across the surveys and sorts them by how sure it is:
- Identical questions link in one click, with a single Link identical matches button.
- Questions that need a look wait in a review list, each with the reason spelled out, such as "the wording differs" or "the choices differ". You can link a reworded question to the right one, or leave it out.
- Answer choices are matched by their wording, so a list in a different order, or with different recoded values, still lines up. You can also map each choice by hand, add it as a new combined choice, or leave it out of the combined results.
- Rating scales have to cover the same range to be linked, and PaperSurvey refuses to link two scales whose end labels run in opposite directions, because their answers would cancel each other out.
Nothing is combined until you confirm it. A few specialised question types, such as signatures, MaxDiff sets and Before/After tables, cannot be combined yet, and the Links tab lists them so nothing goes missing without you knowing.
3. Read the results. The multi-survey analysis opens in the same analysis area every PaperSurvey survey has. You get a chart for every linked question with every survey's answers counted together, a Survey filter to narrow the results to one site or a few, and Compare Responses, which breaks any question down by survey with significance testing, so "is the north campus really behind?" gets an answer rather than a hunch. You can build reports on the combined questions and share them with a read-only link. The Responses tab lists every response with the survey it came from, and opening one takes you to its own survey, where it can be edited.
Here is a questionnaire of the kind districts duplicate school by school:
You can open the full School Climate Survey template, print a copy for each school, and combine them whenever you need the district view.
Nothing Is Copied, So It Stays Current
Multi-survey analysis does not merge your surveys or duplicate any data. It reads each survey's own responses through the links you confirmed, so a stack of forms scanned this morning or a web response submitted a minute ago shows up in the combined results the next time you open them. There is no export to redo and no master spreadsheet to keep in step.
The surveys themselves are untouched. Each one keeps its own responses, its own printing and its own results page. If someone edits a linked question in one of the surveys later, that survey's answers to it are held back from the combined results until the change is reviewed, so a rewritten question cannot quietly mix into the totals. And if you no longer need the combined view, deleting it leaves every survey and every response exactly as it was.
Paper and Web, Pooled in One Place
This is where PaperSurvey.io differs from online-only tools. Each survey in the combination can collect on paper, on the web, or both. Paper forms are printed from the editor, scanned on any office scanner or phone, and read automatically with optical mark recognition for checkboxes and AI handwriting recognition for written answers. Web responses come in through the same survey's link.
When you combine the surveys, all of it lands in one set of results. Compare Responses can split any question by data source as well as by survey, so you can see whether the paper forms and the web link tell the same story. That makes multi-site paper programmes practical to analyze as one:
- School districts combining the same climate or course survey from every school or class.
- Councils and public services pooling resident feedback collected on paper at each office or neighbourhood event.
- Events and training programmes combining every session's feedback forms into one season.
- Field research pooling questionnaires from several field sites or enumerator teams.
- Yearly waves set side by side, even when the wording shifted a little from one year to the next.
If your sites run on paper today, our guide to running paper surveys across multiple locations covers the collection side, and our look at online and paper response rates explains why the paper channel is often worth keeping.
Getting the Data Out
On the Surveys tab of the multi-survey analysis, Download summary (Excel) builds a workbook with three sheets: a Summary sheet with the counts and percentages of every survey together, a By survey sheet with each survey's own counts, and a Links sheet listing exactly what was combined, so a colleague or reviewer can check the merge. It follows whatever filters you set on the Analysis tab.
For the raw data, the usual exports work on combined results too: Excel, CSV, SPSS, R, SAS and Stata. The Excel, CSV and SPSS files name the survey each response came from, so you can carry the site comparison into your own analysis. Our help article on exporting survey data walks through the formats.
Starting Fresh? One Survey May Be Simpler
Multi-survey analysis is the answer when your data is already spread across copies. If you are setting up a new multi-site project, there is often a simpler route: keep one survey and tag each location's responses, for example by printing each site's forms in a batch tagged with its name. You then maintain one form, the results show every location together, and you can compare locations by tag. Our help article on tagging survey responses explains when one survey is the better choice and when separate copies make sense.
Who Should Stay With Their Current Tool
An honest note. If every site you survey collects online, and your team already uses SurveyMonkey's multi-survey dashboards or Alchemer's cross-survey reports, you have a working answer and no paper problem for PaperSurvey.io to solve. The same goes for teams who only need a one-off merged spreadsheet and are comfortable lining up the columns themselves.
PaperSurvey.io earns its place when some of your sites, classes or waves come back on paper, or when you want the combined view to keep updating as new forms are scanned instead of rebuilding it after every collection round. If you are weighing the wider landscape, our SurveyMonkey alternative and Qualtrics paper survey alternative guides compare where each kind of tool fits.
The Bottom Line
Running the same questionnaire as separate surveys per site, class or year is normal, and it should not cost you the big picture. Multi-survey analysis links the questions your surveys share, checks the ones that differ with you before anything is combined, and gives you one live set of results across paper and web, with every site still comparable on its own.
The free trial requires no credit card. Start your free trial, tick two copies of the same survey, and see your combined results take shape.