Collecting various information or feedback is something you may need to do from time to time. A survey is the quickest and most efficient way to do this. To create and deploy surveys, ALA has a SurveyMonkey account that LITA staff can use. You also have the option set up an individual free account, for smaller surveys. SurveyMonkey is simple to use, and easy to customize. It integrates with other software such as Eventbrite, HootSuite, MailChimp, Trello, and more.
In order to have a survey distributed through SurveyMonkey:
- Create your survey using an individual (free) account. There will probably be more edits and revisions than you anticipate, some of the logic and requirements can be time consuming if you have less experience creating surveys or using SurveyMonkey.
- Contact Mark Beatty to let him know you’d like to distribute it through LITA’s normal channels.
- ‘Share a copy’ of your survey, hopefully as finalized a version as you can. LITA staff may make some suggestions that you should consider adopting. In some instances, such as demographics categories, ALA already has standard fields and labels that LITA should use.
- Work with LITA staff to determine the length of time you’d like the survey to be open for responses.
- LITA staff will distribute to LITA-L, LITA Blog, social media, etc. based on preferences and/or after helping determine the best distribution paths.
- After the survey closes, Mark will provide you with an analysis link so you can review the results.
Google Forms is another survey tool, free with a Google account. Also easy to use and customize, this could be useful for simple surveys, or questionnaires within committees.
Both survey tools (especially SurveyMonkey) provide analytics for the data collected. Charts, graphs, and reports make it easy to report findings, and analyze results.
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