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 the LITA team can access and 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, MailChimp, Trello, Hootsuite, and more.
In order to have a survey distributed through Survey Monkey:
- 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 Survey Monkey.
- Contact Mark Beatty, letting him know you’d like to distribute through LITA’s normal paths.
- ‘Share a copy’ of your survey, hopefully as finalized a version as you can. LITA / ALA staff will may some suggestions that you should consider adopting.
- 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, their blog, twitter, etc. based on preferences and/or after helping determine best distribution paths.
- After the survey closes, LITA staff (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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