Track Progress & Close Survey

Staying in Control of Your Live Study

Once your Delphi survey is live and participants are submitting responses, your attention turns to monitoring and managing the data collection process. This is an active phase that requires regular check-ins, thoughtful judgment, and timely decisions.

Regardless of your study format, your core responsibilities during this phase are the same: track incoming responses, monitor participation levels, assess data quality, and determine when the study — or a given round — is ready to move forward.

How you carry out these responsibilities, however, depends on whether you are running a Real-Time Delphi or a Multiple-Round Delphi. Each format has its own rhythm and requires a different management approach.

Real-Time Delphi: Continuous Monitoring

How It Works

In a real-time Delphi, the survey runs as a single, ongoing process. There are no defined rounds — participants can access the survey at any time, view aggregated feedback from other respondents, and revise their answers as the collective picture evolves. The platform updates all statistics and visualizations automatically, so no manual intervention is needed to share feedback between participants.

Your role is to observe this process closely and intervene only where necessary.

Monitoring Responses and Results

You should check in on your study regularly throughout the data collection period. The platform provides live-updated analytics — including response distributions, medians, means, and participant comments — that give you an ongoing picture of how expert opinion is taking shape.

As you review these results, ask yourself:

Are responses converging around shared positions, or does significant disagreement persist?
Are results stabilizing over time, or are opinions still shifting?
Is the overall picture consistent and coherent, or are there anomalies that warrant attention?

Reviewing results early and often allows you to assess data quality before the study closes, rather than discovering issues afterward.

Managing Participation

Strong participation is the foundation of reliable results. Use the participant tab to monitor who has responded and identify those who have not yet engaged. If participation levels are lower than expected, send targeted reminder emails to non-respondents.

Timely reminders have a meaningful impact on final response rates. Do not wait until the final days of your study to follow up — a well-timed nudge early in the process is often more effective than a last-minute push.

Deciding When to Close

Unlike a multiple-round study, a real-time Delphi does not have a predefined endpoint. Closing the survey is a judgment call that you make based on the evidence in front of you. Consider closing when:

Sufficient consensus has been reached on the key items
A sufficient number of responses has been collected relative to your panel size
Results have become stable, with little meaningful change occurring over time
Participation is reasonably balanced across any relevant subgroups

When these conditions are met, close the survey and proceed to the analysis phase.

Multiple-Round Delphi: Iterative Round Management

How It Works

A multiple-round Delphi follows a structured, cyclical process. Each round consists of data collection, analysis, and deliberate preparation for the next iteration. As the researcher, you are actively involved in managing each transition — this format requires more hands-on coordination, but it also gives you greater control over the progression toward consensus.

Each round moves through the following steps.

Monitor the Current Round

Track incoming responses, monitor participation, send reminders to non-respondents, and review preliminary results as they accumulate. When you are satisfied that sufficient responses have been collected, close the current round. Closing a round locks the responses for that iteration and allows you to move into the analysis stage.

Analyze Results

With the round closed, conduct a thorough review of the results. Examine response distributions, key statistics, and the qualitative comments participants have provided. Your central question at this stage is: are opinions converging, or is there still meaningful divergence? Comments often reveal the reasoning behind outlier positions — understanding these perspectives is valuable when preparing the next round.

Decide Whether to Continue

Based on your analysis, make a deliberate decision about whether the study has reached a satisfactory conclusion or whether another round of iteration is needed. Common grounds for stopping include:

Sufficient consensus has been reached on the key items
Responses have stabilized, with little change expected from further rounds
A predefined number of rounds has been completed, as specified in your study design

Prepare the Next Round

One of the key advantages of running your study on durvey.org is that the platform automatically carries forward the most important feedback from the previous round. Participants will see aggregated results — including the mean, quartiles, and full distribution via a box plot — alongside the comments submitted by the panel. This means participants can immediately see where the group stands and make informed decisions about whether to revise their positions, without any manual preparation on your part.

What you focus on instead is enriching the context around each question. Within the survey pages, you have the option to add text, images, and graphics to accompany individual items — for example, to highlight a key finding from the previous round, provide additional background, or visualize a trend that participants should consider. This is entirely optional, but it can significantly deepen the quality of deliberation on complex or contested topics.

As you prepare the updated round, keep the following in mind:

Review the automatically generated feedback to ensure it accurately reflects the previous round before the new one goes live
Maintain consistency in question wording to allow meaningful comparison across rounds
Add supplementary content thoughtfully — images and graphics work best when they genuinely inform participant judgment, not when they steer it
Test the updated survey from the participant's perspective before sending invitations

Launch the Next Round

With the updated questionnaire ready, send invitations for the new round using the platform's Invitation Manager. Monitor participation as responses come in, send reminders where necessary, and repeat the cycle until your stopping criteria are met.

Finalizing Your Study

When your study is complete — whether you are closing a real-time survey or concluding the final round of a multiple-round study — take the following steps before moving into analysis:

Close the survey to prevent further submissions
Send thank-you emails to participants, acknowledging their contribution and time
Verify the completeness of your data, checking for any gaps or anomalies that may need to be addressed

These steps ensure a clean, well-documented handoff into the analysis phase and leave participants with a positive impression of the study — which matters if you plan to engage the same panel in future research.

The Facilitator's Mindset

Tracking progress is not a passive activity. Whether you are running a real-time or multiple-round study, your ongoing involvement shapes the quality of the results. Staying attentive, acting on early signals, and making well-timed decisions are what allow a carefully designed study to fulfill its potential.

With data collection complete, you are ready to move into the next phase: analyzing your results and drawing meaningful conclusions from your panel's collective expertise.

Next: Analysis Phase →