Web-based Survey Tools

Its only Tuesday and the week is already shaping up to be quite busy. At the end of the last week, I got several requests concerning conducting web-based surveys. In the past the Libraries had built each survey individually for the person conducting the survey. This isn’t very efficient and means that the survey builder doesn’t have the ability to initiate the survey or add content to themselves. They are completely reliant on systems staff to create and customize the survey. Because the Web Services staff are currently working on developing content management tools to enable users to manage the site, it would be impractical for us to build a full-featured survey creation tool at this time. Therefore, I began looking at commercial solutions that would allow us to efficiently create web-based surveys. I wanted to find a product which was hosted so that multiple library staff could use the product simultaneously, there would be no installation overhead, and no maintainence work for the Web Services staff. In my search I considered in depth the following products:

• Survey Monkey
• Zoomerang
• SurveySolutions Express from Perseus

All of these products have a free version that contains fewer features than the full version. They all offer the option for you to put up a web page for users to visit for the survey or send a the survey to a select group of people. They provide a variety of different types of questions that you can include in your survey from single answer multiple choice to open-ended questions. Some products have survey templates which are helpful. Most have themes that change the look and feel of the survey. Other include the ability to use question logic. Ie if a person answers no to question 3 then they skip questions 4, 5, and 6. All the products allow you to base a new survey on an existing one. However, the free versions often limit the number of survey responses you can collect and you have to view your data via the web site. However, they are fully functional and would be a terrific no-cost solution for organizations that needed to do a survey on a shoestring.

One of the best features that the full versions include is the ability to export data. Survey Monkey allow you to export survey results in a variety of formats from a summary data in CSV format to a set of CSVs that can be used to create a relational database of the data. The full versions also typically allow you to upload a set of email address that you want the survey sent to. Additionally, Survey Monkey also let’s you limit the number of response you collect, limit response collection to a specific IP address, or make users enter a password to complete the survey. The full version of most products allow you to add a custom logo. One feature that was lacking in all the products I looked at was the ability to have many users under a single account with each user being able to manage their own surveys. Survey Monkey seems to be working on this as an enhancement but hasn’t implemented it yet.

Perseus Express was very enticing. I’ve worked with Perseus’ client-based products before and found them very easy to use. However, when I attempted to sign up I discovered that I couldn’t make it work with my Mac in any browser. This was quite disappointing because they offer the most features for the lowest cost (no cost essentially).

In the end I decided to implement Survey Monkey because it had more features and was cross-browser and platform compliant. In particular, the different export formats were highly desirable. They also had visible and easy to understand privacy statement that explained they policies on your survey data. Privacy issues are something you need to take into consideration when licensing one of these products particularly if they store your response data. You want to make sure that the vendor does not use the survey data you collect in any way. On most sites this is very clear, but if it isn’t contact the vendor and get their policy in writing. Once you deal with the privacy issues, I would suggest that you get a free account and try the different products in order to decide on which product best fits your needs.