Ever want to know what people are thinking? Need to collect information from your employees, peers, customers or club/team members? Are you looking for a way to provide online test/quizzes? There are a number of great online services that can help you collect and analyze data, check for knowledge, or gather opinions. Here are a few of my favorites.
Google Documents is one of the best all around solutions I have found. You create the survey, they provide you with a link to share (or code to embed in your web site), they store the results in a spreadsheet and you can easily share summary results with others. If you don’t want to use Google Spreadsheets to analyze the results you can easily export to excel or other popular formats. The collaborative editing features of Google Documents allows you to easily share the detailed results with others. As with most Google applications its free and easy to use, they even provide a gallery of fun “skins” or templates for the online surveys. Unfortunately you cannot currently redirect people to a specific web site at the end of the survey or based on the results.
Kwiksurvey is a great solution if you want to produce longer surveys, ones that will allow you to provide different survey questions based on answers to questions, or need a larger suite of question types. It also allows you to export to excel, share results with participants, and redirect to other web sites.
Polldaddy provides basic surveys with an abundance of options including the ability to create polls that you can embed in websites, blogs and other social media sites. I’d recommend it more strongly if it was not limited to 100 responses per month for the free account but if you want the slicker interface and some of the advance features and analysis it provides you might want to upgrade to one of their paid options.
ProProfs is a service I recently discovered aimed on online testing resources for teachers and may make the top of my list as a survey/polling tool. It does not have the restrictions on respondents, is free, and easily lets you embed pictures and video.
