Non-Profit Tools

(Originally posted 4/7/2007)

The ability to receive feedback from those associated with your organization, whether they are members, volunteers, staff, or anyone else related to your work, can be a very powerful tool.

Survey Monkey is an online survey system which is easy to use and reasonably priced.

There are two levels of membership in Survey Monkey. The basic membership allows you to create surveys of up to 10 questions with up to 100 responses to each survey, while the professional subscription allows an unlimited number of surveys with an unlimited number of questions and a total of 1000 responses per month. If you exceed the 1000 responses it is $0.05 per additional response. Additionally; the professional subscription allows you to brand the survey with your own logo.

Survey Monkey offers a 25% discount to its customers who meet the following criteria:

“The discount will be offered only to corporations, trusts and foundations which (a) are organized exclusively for charitable purposes, (b) are exempt from taxation under IRC Section 501(c)(3) and (c) receive substantial support directly from the general public or private individuals.”

The surveys themselves can include a variety of response types including open ended essay responses and ranking scales. You can download all of the results in to an excel document for analysis.

There are a number of ways to administer the survey. The first category of collection is to create a link. This link can either be sent via an e-mail, added to a webpage, or sent via an e-mail list to a group of respondents. The second category is to create pop-up windows for your website. You can either have the survey itself come up or you can have an invitation appear whenever someone visits a specific page on your site.

After investigating a number of online survey sites I have found Survey Monkey to meet the needs of our company in terms of features, cost, and ease of use.