Online surveys help you gather information quickly and get feedback from your customers. From internal uses such as voting for your next team building event to getting feedback from customers, online services make it easier to collect information and collate it into meaningful reports without all that manual labour.
Here are some of our favorite sites which you can use to create surveys. If you have any that you recommend please let us know in the comments section.
We'll have to start with our favourite:
Plans: Freemium + Paid Package ($14.95-$199.95/month)
The stand-out feature in this survey tool is the payment integration – your PayPal, Google Checkout or Authorize.net accounts can be connected to WuFoo Forms to collect donations or payments.Wufooreally breaks the survey process down, keeping the process simple and still flexible enough to customize. The actual forms and reports are as clean, customizable and beautiful as the survey process. While all of the survey tools listed here offer discounts for nonprofits, Wufoo offers an impressive 50 percent discount.
Link: http://wufoo.com/
SurveyMonkey
Plans: Freemium + Select Package ($16.99/month) + Gold Package ($24.99/month) + Premium Package ($64.99)
SurveyMonkey is one of the more popular online survey tools today. They offer a free version for small and informal surveys, but the customization options are very limited. The paid packages offers unlimited questions and responses, customizability, skip logic, and the ability to export Excel and PDF files. Reports are minimal, but they allow you to export results for further analysis with the use of another application.
Zoomerang
Plans: Freemium + Pro Package ($149/year) + Premium Package ($449)
Zoomerang is similar to SurveyMonkey in many respects, but offers in a more powerful package for more money. Zoomerang has a very limited free package; the more useful Pro package is offered to nonprofits for unlimited surveys, questions and respondents, and a Premium package includes mobile surveys, comparison reports, multi-user survey sharing and collaboration, and statistical analysis. The survey building tools are not quite as intuitive as SurveyMonkey’s, and it can be more difficult to learn. However, Zoomerang offers more extensive reporting, with a flexible cross-tabulation report tool that lets survey administrators see the data relationships across any set of questions.
SurveyGizmo
Plans: 14-day Trial + Basic ($19/month) + Advanced ($49-$160/month)
SurveyGizmo offers a low-cost solution with some advanced features—it supports 1,000 responses per month, and basic logic—as well as a range of more advanced packages. At all levels, SurveyGizmo offers basic piping, fully customizable survey look and feel, and the ability to embed images and videos hosted on your own website. More advanced levels offer many randomization options.
PollDaddy
Plans: Freemium + Advanced ($200-$900/year)
PollDaddy offers surveys and polls that can be easily embedded into external websites and applications. The free package offers a maximum of 10 questions per survey and 100 responses per month, plus basic reporting. Survey features are more limited than some of the other options in this category, with no skip logic or piping, but survey administrators have a lot of flexibility over the look of the survey, by selecting from pre-designed templates, or fully customizing the template by editing style sheet code.
Link: http://polldaddy.com/
Constant Contact
Plans: Pro Package ($10-$150/month)
Although known primarily as an email marketing tool, Constant Contact offers “Listen-Up,” a hosted survey tool with some interesting benefits. There’s no free option, but fee-based packages are competitive with other lower-cost options depending on the number of respondents who will be answering surveys. Constant Contact offers more than 40 predesigned templates with some ability to customize. Surveys can include skip logic, and can be scheduled in advance. The tool also offers a variety of emailing and email management services, including contact importing, list segmentation and basic contact management. Reports are quite basic, but data can be exported for analysis in another tool.
FormSite
Plans: Fremium + Pro Package ($10-$100/month)
FormSite offers a tool for building website forms—everything from simple “contact us” forms to evaluation forms. Although the focus is forms for feedback and test-taking, FormSite offers a basic set of survey features, and may be useful to those looking to collect a lot of different types of information via web-forms. Features include multiple page surveys, question randomization, basic skip logic and piping. Surveys can be customized to match your website by someone familiar with HTML.
Link: http://www.formsite.com/
Moodle
Plans: Free
Moodle is a powerful open source course management software package primarily targeted at schools and universities. It integrates website content management and online course management with survey and test-taking solutions. The survey tools are geared toward those gathering feedback from students to assess teaching methods, and several verified survey instruments are provided for this purpose. Moodle may be appropriate for nonprofits running training programs or schools seeking an all-in-one website, course and survey management solution for their programs. The package is free to download, but will require substantial technical knowledge to install, configure, customize and support.
Link: http://moodle.org
Qualtrics
Plans: Corporate Plan ($10,000/year)
Formerly known as SurveyZ, Qualtrics provides advanced survey logic and analysis targeted at research surveys, with a focus on academic institutions. Qualifying nonprofits can get a bargain with a free-for-a-year “consultant” account which allows up to 1,000 responses per month and two surveys at a time. The corporate plan provides data analysis support for cross-tabulation, conjoint analysis, subgroup analysis, time series analysis and more.
QuestionPro
Plans: Freemium + Advanced Package ($14-$99/month)
QuestionPro packages range from limited free versions to more advanced options. The free package lets you re-use questions from one survey to the next, or pull questions from a standard survey template library. The more advanced packages offer unlimited surveys, questions and responses with skip logic, piping, randomization and even more complex survey logic, as well as multimedia and multilingual support. QuestionPro also offers an API to exchange survey data with outside applications, including a module for Salesforce.com integration.
LimeSurvey
Plans: Free
This is a powerful, free and open source survey package appropriate for nonprofits looking for advanced survey logic and analysis features and who have substantial technology support. Its range of features includes full customization of survey look and feel, support for 40 different languages, piping, skip logic, a library of available survey questions and blast emailing. The tool has a large support community and is under active development. This is an open source package that can be downloaded for free, installed on your own web server, and customized to your needs by a developer with knowledge of PHP/ MySQL. Although the tool itself is free, be prepared to bear the costs for your own web hosting, and the time it takes to properly install, configure, customize and support this product on your own.
KeySurvey
Plans: Pro Package ($1,950 to $5,950/year)
This is the most robust of the advanced survey tools covered in this article. It offers a full set of features, including several unusually advanced ones such as LDAP integration to allow single-sign-on models for large organizations, role based permissions, support for “teacher/student” surveys, multimedia questions and much more. Key Survey also offers an API to exchange survey data with outside applications, with a module for Salesforce.com integration.
Cool Web Toys
Plans: Free
After you register for a free account at Cool Web Toys, you can create a poll by choosing from a web poll, an embedded web chat client, or a “CoolWebOfTheDay”. The poll can include content such as word of the day, quote of the day, or any other content. As far as poll creation goes, it’s quite easy to use. You can specify size and colors to match your site! Results appear quickly and the visitor will not leave your site unless they click on “More Info”. If they click on that link a new browser window will open up and they will be on the site with a bunch of Adsense ads.
Vizu
Plans: Free
Polls generated by Vizu.com are delivered via a Flash widget rather than a snippet of JavaScript or HTML code. Vizu walks you through the steps of creating a poll and gives you total control of the look and feel. To create a poll, you first create the question, then choose if it’s an “opinion” or a “prediciton” poll, then choose keywords and categories so that your poll is easy to find. You can also add pictures or links to your poll. A Vizu poll on your site is free with registration.
Link: http://www.vizu.com
Blog Flux
Plans: Free
Blog Flux requires that you create an account on their site before you can create a poll. Once your account is created, you can then create the poll with up to five options. You also have a choice of customizing the poll's look and feel. After the visitor clicks on the add my vote link, the results will appear in place of the poll questions on your site. A unique feature is that the voting results are mapped on Google maps. The site has other tools to enhance your blog such as a button or chicklet creator, a link logger, and a page rank checker.
Link: http://www.blogflux.com/
Quibblo
Plans: Free
Creating a poll at Quibblo.com is a simple two-step process. After you are registered, log-in and choose your question and create the answers. There is no customization however. Visitors who choose to click on the “Discuss this poll at Quibblo.com” link will be taken to their site, where they will need to register as a user before they are allowed to leave a comment about the poll.
Link: http://www.quibblo.com/
Ballot-Box
Plans: Free
Purpose: Ballot-Box allows you to create a free online poll for your website. Before you can get started, you'll need to create an account. Then you can create 15 questions for your poll and each question can have 15 answers. Poll appearances are completely customizable with real-time updates and poll results. Poll results can be made private or public and also prevents users from voting twice. You can also create up to 25 polls. If you are conducting a survey, you might want to consider creating a poll with multiple questions.
Link: http://ballotbox.ie/
Easy Poll
Plans: Free
Easy Poll is an easy and effective way to make your site more interactive. Easy-Poll has a large selection of patterns and colors for free polls. They offer two sorts of polls: a yes or no poll and a multiple-choice poll. Another great thing about this poll creation site is that you don't need additional software or IT support - everything is handled and calculated on their servers quickly and safely. Two minutes is all it takes to sign up, and you can create a poll for free.
FluidSurveys
Plans: Freemium + Pro Package ($17-49/month)
If you need form tools to build a questionnaire, online forms, quizzes, polls or surveys, choose FluidSurveys. Their free plan allows for the creation of unlimited polls with unlimited responses, and their powerful drag & drop interface is incredibly easy to use. For an alternative to Survey Monkey, or to conduct an advanced longitudinal survey, FluidSurveys is right for the job. Its powerful questionnaire tool and online survey software enable you to design and launch your project in minutes. Deploy your survey online, offline, and even on mobile devices.
Link: http://fluidsurveys.com
Google Forms
Plans: Free
If you’re looking for a free service for small-scale surveying, this is hands down the best option out there. All of the other survey tools do have a free option, which usually entails a limit to the amount of surveys (10 per month) and responses (100 per month).Google Formsoffers an unlimited amount of surveys and space for well over 1,000 responses. Themes for your survey are plentiful, the software makes email or web embedding easy and, being Google, there are a number of ways to visualize your data. To use it, just go toGoogle Docsand create a new form.
Conducting and analyzing surveys can be really difficult and frustrating, but these sites will help make your life easier. Don't forget to market them though! The best way to see if they work for you is to try it out.
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