I’m a bit unfamiliar with creating surveys online – but I did create a rather large online survey last summer that was sent to 2000+ employees. I used SurveyMonkey as the company I was working for had a corporate account with the website, and the survey itself was actually very easy to create and distribute.
I began looking for a different tool to use for this week’s activity. I started by searching for ‘online survey tools’ using Google. I came across several listings of different tools – which can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4.
It was immediately apparent after searching that there is an abundant amount of survey tools out there. What was great about some of the lists I found was that they ranked the survey tools from good to bad. A few things that seem to make up a good online survey tool include its ability to be integrated with other websites or tools, ability to customize the look and design of the survey (something very important for surveys that need to replicate a brand), how easy it is to use, the cost associated with using the tool, how collected data is stored, organized and shared, and finally, if the data can be exported to another format, such as into a downloadable spreadsheet or PDF file.
The three tools I decided to look into included QuestionPro, SurveyGizmo, and Survey Crafter.
QuestionPro
This tool comes in both a free and paid version, and has over twenty pre-built themes that the user can chose from. The tool sorts questions by ‘standard’ and ‘advanced’ – with advanced giving you more options to customize your question. The tool can be connected with Facebook if you wanted to place your survey on a social network. You can also copy questions from another survey you have created with the tool. QuestionPro is also used by many large corporations such as Motorola, Microsoft, Honeywell, and ING, and seems to be one of the largest competitors to SurveyMonkey.
SurveyGizmo
This tool has a nice, clean interface and allows for customizable colours and formats like QuestionPro. Standard answers such as Yes/No and a rating scale are built into the tool which minimizes the amount of typing you’ll need to do. SurveyGizmo has a free version, but it seems to be very limited in what you can do. The tool can be purchased in four different packages, ranging from $19 per month to $7,888 per year.
Survey Crafter
Survey Crafter also allows for customizable surveys, but costs $345 for a student-licensed copy. Seems rather expensive. Their website is also terrible and looks very unprofessional. However, the tool can be used with many different languages, has a ‘built-in interviewer’ which can enter new data or modify existing responses, and can also generate many tables and charts, cross tabulations, correlation matrices and statistics tables.
I wanted to try Survey Crafter for this activity to try out the ‘built-in interviewer’, but I’m definitely not willing to shell out the $345. I decided on using QuestionPro as they seemed to have the best free version, and I liked that the tool can easily be integrated with Facebook. I was also curious to see how QuestionPro handled surveys in relation to SurveyMonkey.
My 9-question survey can be found here.
Survey Feedback
I sent the survey out to eight people and received four returns. I didn’t really get any sort of reaction about the survey except for the respondents wondering why I was sending them a survey in the first place. I would have liked to create a longer survey, but the free version of QuestionPro only allowed for up to 9 different questions.
Using QuestionPro was definitely a little confusing at the beginning, and I struggled figuring out how to add questions and then edit them if I needed to. If I were to create another survey, I would definitely chose SurveyMonkey over QuestionPro, simply because it is easy to use and modify, and that the free version allows for more questions. Many pop-ups kept appearing while I was creating the survey which was very annoying. All in all, I wouldn’t use QuestionPro again.