As fun as a barrel of monkeys!

Online surveys can be a huge help in understanding what your patrons think and how successful your programs are, without dedicating a huge amount of your budget to survey tools. They can be a very cost-effective way for delivering surveys and collecting and analyzing results through one central system. While they’re not going to be the right fit for every research need (for example, some communities respond better to a paper survey and you are more likely to get a higher response rate using paper among populations that are not as comfortable with computers), online surveys are great for gathering informal data quickly and easily.

What Do These Tools Do?

A good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then provide you with a link to make available to your patrons to answer the survey online. There are a number of them available for little or no cost. I will break down a few of them here:

SurveyMonkey offers a popular online hosted survey tool that works well for basic surveys. It is so popular among libraries, in fact, that I received three SurveyMonkey surveys this week alone!

SurveyMonkey allows you to create and publish custom surveys in minutes, and then view results graphically and in real time. The free version is useful for very small and informal surveys, but allows very little customization of the look of the survey, no downloads of reports or data, and can only collect 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. The Select version ($25.00/month, or $228.00/year) offers unlimited questions and 1000 responses per month, customizability, skip logic and the ability to export Excel and PDF files.. Reports are minimal, but they allow you to export results to another application to do more serious analysis. Higher end Gold and Platinum versions ($29.00/month and $69.00/month) offer advanced features like question and answer piping, randomization, text analysis for open responses, and integration with IBM’s SPSS statistical software. Most importantly to me, the SurveyMonkey logo is discrete on the survey produced and there are not any SurveyMonkey banners on your survey’s pages.

You can read more on my experience below.

Although SurveyMonkey is very popular, there are many other online survey tools. Some of them include:

PollDaddy offers a free package with a maximum of 10 questions per survey and 100 responses per month, plus basic reporting. More advanced versions cost progressively more (up to $1000/year) but with limited options: no skip logic or piping. But survey administrators have a lot of flexibility over the look of the survey, and can select from pre-designed templates, or fully customizing the template by editing stylesheet code. Surveys can be delivered in pop-up windows, and results can be tracked via RSS feed. They call themselves “the most powerful and easy-to-use survey software around”.

SurveyGizmo offers a low-cost (approximately $20/month) package with some advanced features like supporting 1,000 responses per month, and basic logic, as well as a range of more advanced packages at higher monthly rates. 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 (question options, questions per survey page, and pages themselves), skip logic, and more.  Sadly, the free version is only good for 14 days. Not such a great deal in my opinion!


Zoomerang is similar to SurveyMonkey in many respects, but in general, offers more for more. As with SurveyMonkey, there’s a very limited free package. There are two more levels of packages for a price, but  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. 

I would suggest that if you are going to use an online survey tool, try out a free version of a couple and see which one suits your needs best. I did that and quickly settled on SurveyMonkey. I’ve used SurveyMonkey in the past and found it quite simple, so to be honest, the learning curve was pretty flat (actually, they’ve upgraded it since last year and the learning curve may have actually been a little downhill!). The hardest part for me is that I can never remember the login and password after I run one survey so end up creating new email addresses so I can create a new login. Really, if that is the most difficult thing about creating an online survey, I’d be willing to bet that the most online-challenged individual could figure it out.

Building a survey is as simple as:

1. Creating an account (if you’re like me, write down the login and password somewhere you’ll find it when you’re ready to create another survey. For me, this is an annual event at the moment).
2. Creating a “new survey.”
3. Adding a page for each question or two (too many on a page and a survey taker has to scroll down. I find scrolling frustrating; just let me see all the questions on my monitor and click next to get to the next page).
4. Adding the question to the page.
5. Let people know about your survey (link to it on your webpage, add it to your electronic signature in your email, post it on Facebook or Twitter). SurveyMonkey does most of the rest!

Need more in-depth help? SurveyMonkey has a manual. Don’t be alarmed by its 71 pages (eep!); it really is simple and full of images.

What I see when I log into my list (of one) surveys:

A sample results page (notice, I have kept it to two questions per screen):

And this is how the narrative answers appears to the survey creator:

The upgrades I’d have liked weren’t worth the additional price for the small (9 question) survey I wanted to use, so I chose to forgo upgrading. However, you can easily plug the results SurveyMonkey provides into a spreadsheet and manipulate your own charts and statistics without much extra work. Since I work in a library who’s population still prefers paper surveys over online, I will have to manipulate those responses that way anyway, so the few (16 so far) online surveys I’ve received really don’t add much workload to that.

What can you use SurveyMonkey for? Anything you’d like feedback on. I use one every year for our annual satisfaction survey. I can see it being used for program feedback (however, I can also see survey tools my website has built in to gather those responses). A library instructor at UBC uses SurveyMonkey to understand the needs of her learners so she can customize her instruction classes to suit the learners’ need. Another person uses SurveyMonkey to create registration forms for events. In reality, the questions you could ask using SurveyMonkey are only limited to your imagination!

Read what I read:

Gordon, A. (2002). SurveyMonkey.com – Web-Based Survey and Evaluation System. Internet and Higher Education, 5(2002), 83-87.