Initial Publication Date: April 13, 2015

Online Survey Tools

This web page was written by Carol Ormand.

If you are thinking about designing a student or alumni survey as part of your program assessment toolkit, you may want to consider using an online survey tool. There are many available, and while we cannot tell you which one would best suit your needs, here is some information and a few options to get you started.

Jump down to Best Practices in Survey Design * Factors to Consider in Choosing a Survey Tool * Survey Tools

Survey Tool Comparisons

In August of 2006, John Bates published a comparison of 5 electronic survey tools, all available to the public. His comparison is based on ease of use, survey features, and price.

Best Practices in Survey Design

From QuestionPro: Writing Great Questions for Online Surveys
Recorded webinar from Zoomerang: Surveying 101: Best Practices and Tips

Factors to Consider in Choosing a Survey Tool

Once you know the answers to these questions, follow the links to specific survey tools, below, to see whether they will satisfy your needs.

How many questions will be on the survey?
How many people are going to be taking the survey?
How long do you want the survey tool to collect responses?
How long do you want the survey tool to store the survey response data (so that you can keep accessing it)?
In what form do you want to export the survey result data (Excel, SPSS, etc.)?
How do you want to solicit survey participants? If you send the participants an email with the URL for the survey, the survey tool will not be able to tell you which of the list of participants have taken the survey or not (and you won't be able to tell, yourself).
Do you want to allow multiple people from the same IP address to be able to take the survey, such as in case of students in a college computer lab?
Do you mind if the survey tool will ignore someone on your list of potential survey participants because they have declined a survey on that tool before?