Surveys and Polls

Public How To
1

Overview

There are many situations where you might want to gather data from people within the Forum, such as:

  1. To gauge the opinions of a group on an issue
  2. To collate information about things going on in the sector
  3. To collaborate on something specific

We have several ways of doing this in the Forum, and they each have strengths and weaknesses.

Wikis - the simplest:

A wiki allows other people to edit your post; this is great for something simple and allows ‘free-range’ in what people put down. More details are here:

Strengths:

  1. Easy to setup - just write the starting post and enable the wiki.
  2. Allows anyone to put anything, and the structure can evolve.

Weaknesses:

  1. It is a bit of a learning curve for people to work out how to edit a wiki
  2. Things can get messy and the structure will need curation / tidying up

Polls - more powerful

These are perfect for simple questions. They can be ‘multiple choice’ with a single answer, a number, or ‘choose several from a list’. Anyone can make one, and the results are displayed live with breakdowns according to profession and the like.

Strengths:

  1. Easy to set up and very powerful
  2. Can be limited to a specific group, and the results revealed or concealed as wished ‘on-the-fly’
  3. Leverages the data that HFNZ already holds about people
  4. @admins can get you the results in spreadsheet form

Weaknesses:

  1. You can only have one question per poll. You can however have multiple polls per post.
  2. You can’t ask fancier questions nor qualitative questions - but people can post replies for that.

Wizard based survey - more power, but need help

For multiple questions, this is the best choice. The questions themselves can be quite complicated, and they can be answered in several ways including free text. However, these require the help of @admins to setup and the data must be processed before being displayed.

Strengths:

  1. Can handle complex surveys
  2. Keeps things inside the Forum
  3. The data can be linked to other HFNZ data, meaning you don’t need to ask location, name, etc
  4. The results are in spreadsheet form

Weaknesses:

  1. Takes quite a bit of work and help to set up
  2. Takes quite a bit of work to interpret the spreadsheet so that it is ready for people to look at.

External survey software - go outside the forum

Dedicated survey software can be the best choice, especially for complex surveys, if the user is familiar with them. Some examples are Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo.

Strengths:

  1. Can handle very complex surveys (if you pay)
  2. Can represent the data clearly

Weaknesses:

  1. Significant learning curve
  2. Can’t leverage the Forum (or HiNZ) data (have to ask name, job, location, etc, etc)
  3. It can be tricky to present the data back in the Forum