A recent e-group enquiry asked for recommendations of platforms for small/ cheap quantitative surveys… accepting their limitations, these are good for quick or occasional surveys. Recommendations included
Typeform: Visually appealing, easy to use and single month subscription available. Great if you want something very easy to set up, free, looks good and can be set up by a novice.
Downsides –
- there didn’t seem to be a good choice of types of questions, so no ranking for instance
- don’t ever use the ’short text’ option, unless your participants are really, genuinely going to say something like “the blue one”
- don’t use Typeform for anything that has lots of text in the answers. It gets slower and slower as the questionnaire goes on, crashes, asks the participants if they speak English, quits, loses their responses and generally is just a bit flaky
- it’s better to complete on desktop than mobile
- doesn’t feed into a Powerpoint very easily, lots of screen shots, cutting and pasting
SurveyMonkey: Lots of praise for what it does offer for the money although it does seem to be Marmite.
SurveyGizmo: Worth looking at and pretty good for small scale things
Toluna Quicksurveys: The basic programme is free to use – you just send a link to respondents, worth checking out, particularly if you want sample too
Qualtrics
SNAP Surveys
Google Forms: Easy, free and scalable, good for something fairly simple
Warning – watch out for companies who charge by the respondent (such as Dimensions and Confirmit)
If anyone has any additional suggestions or experiences, please email us and we will add them to the article.