User Surveys Via the Web

[Randy Anderson]

Mr. Hume,

You have a number of choices for doing a web based survey work but first
a couple of questions will help narrow your choices:

1. Do you have access to your web server to install additional programs?
2. What type of system; NT, Win95, Unix flavor is your web server?
3. What type of analysis do you want to do?

Your answers to these will focus the options below but let me give you
some of the options outside of coding it yourself.

1. Hire a service to do this. For a survey of 20 questions and 500
respondences the cost would be about $600. This would be hosted at
another site and linked to yours. (We provide this service)

2. Simple surveys, look at Decisive Survey 2.0, from Decisive Technology
(www.decisive.com). It is based on email so you can email your surveys
or put them on the web and the response are emailed back to you. It is
Win95/NT based and costs are based on the number of surveys, $799/100 or
$1,999/1,000 or $9,999/10,000. Please check my pricing numbers as I may
be out of date.

3. Complex surveys, (multiple threads, looping etc.) see #1.  The
company I represent as developed a very advanced web based survey
tool that has been used by the likes of Microsoft and Campbell's Soups.
It is build on a relational databases like SQL Server or Oracle.

I hope this helps.

Randy Anderson
Signature Solutions
rmanders at sprynet.com

Howard HH Hume wrote:
> 
> I'm looking for recommendations from libraries which have used software
> packages to do user surveys via the web.  What package(s) have you
> used?  Have you been pleased or displeased and why?  Etc.  I don't believe
> we have the technical expertise to develop this in house which is why we are
> looking for, essentially, a turnkey product.
> 
> We have been conducting 2 annual surveys of students and faculty on
> services and resources.  The survey has been distributed in paper and the
> analysis done manually. An intranet was established during the past year (we
> already had a web page) and we think the surveys would be less a workload
> if we could distribute via the web and load replies directly into a database for
> analysis.
> 
> We are a small academic library and have distributed about 800 surveys with
> a 40% return rate.  The most recent survey consisted of 18 questions.  7
> questions requested a free text response (e.g. What did you like best about
> the library?); and the remainder were either Yes/No questions or asked
> respondents to rate the frequency of use or the value of
> resources/services/materials on a 1-2-3 scale.  We are not locked into any
> particular format of the questions, etc.
> 
> Please send replies directly to me; I will summarize responses for the list by
> mid-August.  Thanks very much.
> 
> Howard Hume
> Collection Development Librarian
> National Defense University
> humeh at ndu.edu
> 202-685-3949