Conducting free online surveys with SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey Rocks!

I've been using this online survey tool for a while -- at the end of each semester I use it to poll my students about what they thought of the class and learning activities. You can check out my end-of-semester evaluation here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CG5KZKQ

Today I was working with another faculty member and learned some new tricks!

surveymonkey is a web-based application that -- for free! -- allows you to create an online survey with up to 10 questions, and invite up to 100 people to take the survey. Afterwards, you can view the results online, or download them into Excel or SPSS for further analysis.

One cool thing is that I can upload email addresses to the online address book, and create mailing lists. For example, we created one mailing list of "Faculty" and a second for "AdjunctFaculty" then sent the survey to each group, with a customized email message.

Another cool thing is that I can schedule reminder emails to people who have received the survey invitation, but not completed the survey. That way, if I get swamped with phone calls and meetings next Monday, I don't have to stay late to manually send the reminder notice. :) As soon as I create the survey and send the invitations, I can immediately schedule surveymonkey to send a reminder message next Monday to anyone who did not complete the survey -- Set it and forget it! :)

If you need more features -- like the ability to collect survey responses from more than 100 people per survey, or more than 10 questions in the survey -- you can pay $20/month for additional capabilities. After you've completed your big survey, you can stop paying for "premium access" and go back to the regular free account.



What cool thing did YOU learn today?

:) Abby