Ask how to spend a budget

You end up with a question where every choice costs something and the money is limited, so respondents show you trade-offs instead of ticking everything as important.

There are three ways to ask:

Way	The respondent…	You get
Split a budget	shares a fixed amount between your items (parks, safety, youth…)	the average share of the budget per item
Choose projects within a budget	ticks projects, each with a cost, until the budget is spent	the share of respondents who funded each project, and the most supported set that fits
A budget on a group	places marks on ordinary map questions, each with a price (bench £2k each, path £50 a metre, bed £30 a m²), until the group’s total is spent	marks, metres or m² per question, what they cost, where they went

Before you start

• A budget on a group needs map questions in a map section. The other two work in any section.
• Projects can also be the objects of a reference layer, so each project sits on the map where it would be built. Set a numeric property such as cost on every object first; see Add a reference layer.
• Everything here is free except projects taken from a reference layer, which is part of Pro.

Split a budget

1. Add a question and pick Budget.
2. Under Budget, keep Split a budget selected.
3. Enter the Total budget and pick the Unit: Currency (type the symbol, e.g. £), Points, or % (the total is then 100).
4. Set the Step: amounts move in steps of this size. For £20M, a step of 500000 gives forty steps; leave it empty for a twentieth of the total.
5. Choose the Rule: Must allocate the whole budget, or Can allocate up to the budget.
6. Under Items, add one row per priority. A Description shows under the item for respondents; a Cost here is only a guide. Give each item a Colour: the budget bar is stacked in the items’ colours, so respondents see what went where (for a budget group, it is each map question’s marker colour).
7. Check it in the Live preview: the bar at the top shows what is left, and Next stays blocked until the rule is met.

Choose projects within a budget

1. Pick Budget, then Choose projects within a budget.
2. Enter the total and the unit.
3. Under Items, give every project a Cost — a project without one cannot be saved. Or switch Items to Objects of a layer, pick the layer and name the property that holds the cost. Objects without a number there are shown but cannot be picked.
4. Minimum items asks respondents to pick at least that many.

Respondents tick projects; a project dearer than what is left greys out and says by how much.

A budget on a group

1. In a map section, click New Question and pick Budget group under Map questions. (Or add an ordinary group and give it a total under Budget.) Under Budget, set the Total and the unit (currency with a symbol, or points).
2. Add the map questions that share the budget to the group — a point question for benches, another for lamp posts, a line question for paths, an area question for flower beds — with Add question to group, or drag existing ones in. Add sub-questions to any of them as usual.
3. Open each map question in the group. Under Places per respondent there is now a Price: the amount, and what it is per — a mark; for a line, a metre of the line; for an area or a spray, a square metre.
4. A question without a price places marks for free; the group dialog says how many of its questions are priced.

Respondents see the price on each button (“£50 / m”) and the bar in the group header. A button whose next mark would not fit is greyed out with the reason; a line or area drawn too long or too large is refused with what it would have cost. Everything else about the map questions — sub-questions, minimum and maximum places, tap to place — is unchanged.

Changing a budget on a live survey

Renaming items, descriptions, icons, the rule, the minimum and a group’s title change in place. The total, the unit, the step, the mode, an item’s cost, a group’s total and a map question’s price change what the stored answers mean, so they go to unpublished changes.

Result

Responses shows a bar per item: the average share (split), the share of respondents who funded each project with the set that fits the budget in green (projects), and, for a budget group, one block with the marks, metres or m² per question, what they cost and the share of spend — the marks themselves are on the Map as always. Every export has one column per item and a total; a priced mark carries cost in the GeoJSON and GIS files, and each respondent’s row has a spent column per budget group. You can add the question to public results; items with fewer respondents than the privacy threshold are masked.