When collecting feedback from your team, students, or customers, it’s a good idea to make anonymous submissions to the Google form. You can expect to receive more honest and helpful answers as the respondents’ identity isn’t shared with the form owner. To make a Google form anonymous, follow these steps:
- Go to Google Forms and open the form you want to make anonymous.
Next, click on the Plus icon for a new, blank form. - Next, go to the Settings tab.
Next, go to the Settings tab. - Click on the downward arrow next to Responses to expand the Responses settings.
Click on the down arrow. - Here, turn off the Collect email addresses option.
Turn off Collect email addresses and Limit to 1 response. - You can then turn off the Limit to 1 response. Even though this option does not affect the anonymity of participants, having it on means respondents have to sign in before submitting their response. This can cause respondents to believe it is not anonymous.
Besides these settings, ensure the form doesn’t ask for personally identifiable information. This includes names, email, address, phone number, date of birth, etc.
Testing the form to make sure it’s anonymous
After creating a form, you should test it to ensure it is anonymous. Follow these steps.
- Click on Send in the top-right corner.
Click on Send. - Click on the link icon and choose Copy.
Click on the Link icon and copy the link. - Open an incognito or guest profile on your browser so that you’re no longer logged in to your Google account.
- Paste the copied link into the address bar of the browser.
- Fill out and submit the form. During this stage, check if Google Forms asks you to sign in or share your email address.
- Finally, you can log into your main account and confirm if the submitted response was anonymized.