Editors Note: This blog post on community assessments and survey tools was originally written in 2017 and has been updated with new content.
As a nonprofit leader, one of your greatest challenges is accomplishing a lofty mission on a tight budget.
In addition to tackling your workload and chasing your goals, most likely you are accountable to several governing bodies. This requires reports on metrics like group satisfaction and organization performance metrics. Perhaps you are required to conduct surveys of your various stakeholder communities, either by an external regulatory agency, or by your Board of Directors. Luckily, conducting community assessments does not have to be difficult, nor costly. And it all starts with a simple survey.
Survey Tools
Whether it’s ascertaining to what degree the individuals you serve are satisfied with your programs, or understanding to what extent a new service is achieving its desired targets, a survey is an effective and simple community assessment tool. Below are some survey tools you can begin to use in your agency immediately. Most are available online, making them widely accessible for many of your stakeholders and have both free and paid versions.
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Survey Monkey
is the most well-known and widely used survey tool available. The free version allows for 10 questions, 100 respondents, 15 question types, and light theme customization and templates. The paid version allows for many more questions, respondents, and personalization.
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Typeform
allows for creative survey design. The free version offers unlimited questions, unlimited answers, data exporting, custom themes or standard templates, and basic reporting.
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Google Forms
is the only free online survey that provides skip logic. It also offers unlimited surveys, unlimited respondents, a variety of theme options with the ability for custom logo use, and image and video capability. Survey answers and data are automatically collected in Google Spreadsheets. Occasionally, people with multiple gmail based accounts have trouble accessing surveys.
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Zoho Survey
is simple and easy to use. The free version provides unlimited surveys, 15 survey questions, and 150 responses.
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Alchemer (formerly Survey Gizmo)
can design creative surveys that “make you smile.” The free version offers unlimited surveys and questions, 50 respondents, several basic question types, free templates, basic reporting, and the option to export to CSV.
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Survey Planet
has a free version that is fairly robust. It offers unlimited surveys, unlimited questions, unlimited respondents, survey theme options, and survey embedding.
We encourage you to review the above surveys and develop a basic familiarity with them. Then, pick one and give it a try. These tools are low-cost, low-risk, and high-reward. It’s worth taking the time to understand and implement a few of them.
Of course, a low-cost survey tool is only as good as the actual survey you create. If you need help creating quality surveys contact us today.