Internet survey software - Don't get tangled in the web
If you want to gather feedback on services you are providing via the Internet or an intranet, there is no more effective way to obtain this than with an online survey. Furthermore, large enterprises are increasingly viewing their intranets as being the ideal medium for human resource type surveys or for employee consultation exercises. They are easy for the researcher to administer, easy for the respondent to complete and they are often perceived as being more confidential than surveys on paper.
Online surveys no longer occupy the specialist niche they used to, for two reasons. First, Internet access is becoming universal among many groups. As well as increasingly widespread access to the Internet by the public at large, internal intranets are now commonplace in many big organizations. Second, a copy of Snap Internet means in a couple of days you can set up professional online surveys that previously would have required days or weeks of skilled programming. If you can create a questionnaire in Snap for a conventional pen and paper survey, then you already know almost everything you need to set up a Snap survey on the Internet.
Snap Internet is an optional add-on module to the basic Snap system that will allow you to devise and publish web-based and e-mail surveys using the same familiar tools that you use to create traditional questionnaires
Internet in Operation
Snap Internet is an optional add-on module to the basic Snap system that will allow you to devise and publish web-based and e-mail surveys using the same familiar tools that you use to create traditional questionnaires. Its close integration with the rest of Snap means you analyze the data exactly as you would if you had entered the data yourself. But the joy of Internet research is not having to enter the data – Snap Internet picks up completed interviews from the web at the click of a button.
It is important for surveys to look good on the Internet. Snap will help you to create surveys that have a consistent look and feel, so they can blend in with the rest of your website. You can incorporate logos and graphics too, either to make your questionnaire more eye-catching, or to add images that your questions can refer to directly.
Online interviewing will transform the quality of the data you have to work with. Common sources of response error are eliminated because answers can be checked on screen
Online interviewing will transform the quality of the data you have to work with. Common sources of response error are eliminated because answers can be checked on screen, routing from question to question is automatic and texts can be substituted to reflect answers previously given, making the questionnaire easy to understand.
Snap takes care of the technical aspects of setting up and running a survey online. It really has been designed for people with no knowledge of website technicalities to create web surveys and load them onto their websites, straight out of the box.
If you don’t have a place to locate your survey, then the SurveyShop offers an inexpensive hosting service. The SurveyShop can also provide more advanced services such as secure survey hosting using industry-standard SSL encryption.
The beauty of the Internet is that the information flows both ways. Snap Internet makes it just as easy to publish the results via Internet or intranet to as wide or as selective an audience as you choose.
The beauty of the Internet is that the information flows both ways. Snap Internet makes it just as easy to publish the results via Internet or intranet to as wide or as selective an audience as you choose. The results can be out minutes after the last response has been received.
Snap Internet Case Study: Bristol City Council takes public consultation to the web
Bristol, once one of Britain’s major trading ports, and now the west of England’s main commercial hub, is as keen as any modern city to pursue the trade routes of the 21st century through the Internet. A priority for Bristol City Council, the local authority responsible for Bristol’s 400,000 citizens, is to ensure the benefits of the Internet are for the many, not just the few. It has introduced Internet access points at over 50 locations such as libraries and museums for anyone to tap into the latest information from a chosen range of websites. These include Digital City Bristol, a joint venture between the council, Hewlett Packard and Bristol-based ISP, CityNetgates to provide a major Internet portal and a wide range of information relevant to life and work in Bristol.
When it came to researching the effectiveness of these initiatives, as a part of the UK Government’s Best Value framework, Bristol City Council decided to supplement traditional surveys on paper with two detailed surveys online: one on the web and the other from its 50+ local access points through Digital City Bristol.
Helen Markiewicz, Information Communication Technology officer in the council’s corporate ICT department, was given responsibility for setting these up. Though familiar with Snap for traditional surveys, it was Ms Markiewicz’s first experience of an online survey. She used the integrated Snap Internet module to create her survey as a series of HTML pages.
"It is so much nicer to do because you create the whole look"
Ms Markiewicz considered Snaps ability to incorporate graphics and control style and appearance to be an advantage over traditional paper-based self-completion surveys. "It is so much nicer to do because you create the whole look. It gives your questionnaire a nicer feel to it. You also get more of an idea of what the user is going to think – you are definitely closer to their experience."
Rating the product as very easy to use, Ms Markiewicz found it took no longer to set up the questionnaire for the web than it did for a conventional survey. She suggests that a typical questionnaire would take, at maximum, two days from start to being ready to gather data.
"The HelpDesk support is the best that I have ever known!"
For the first web survey, there were some technical issues to overcome. Ms Markiewicz referred these to Snap’s telephone support line and got a helpful and speedy response, exchanging various files over the e-mail. "They are very good at understanding what you mean, they talk plain English and nothing is too silly. The HelpDesk support is the best that I have ever known!"
Initial response to the survey was very slow, despite the incentive of a cash prize draw. This was overcome by making the links to the questionnaires more prominent and by trailing it in the ‘latest news’ column with a clickable link straight to the questionnaire. The bulk of the responses came in only after the placement had been improved.
Not all the responses were genuine. Spoiled responses were more common from the public access points, accounting for 70 of the 303 responses received, than the web, where only 11 of the 181 responses were eliminated.
It is the lack of data entry Ms Markiewicz finds particularly attractive. "It’s so easy to receive the information in – none of the usual opening letters, or keying things in. It is all done for you, you just click a button once a day. It is actually quite good fun. It is very visual – you can see it all happening."
Once the data has been loaded in, it is immediately ready for analysis using Snap’s charting and cross-tabulation capabilities. Any predefined tables or graphs can be refreshed in an instant to show the latest information.
The survey provided some interesting findings for the city council. Based on both online and on-paper surveys, both the access points and Digital City Bristol were welcomed by users, but the restrictions at access points to a few selected sites were not. These and many other observations were used to create an action plan and a wide range of improvements is now under way.
Summing up her experiences, Ms Markiewicz "I think it is an excellent tool. I would really recommend this as a tool that local authorities should use as a way of carrying out their consultation. I think people feel less intruded on. It is easier for them to choose to reply to this on their own terms and they can complete it if they wish to: it’s giving the user more choices."
The report and results from the survey described in this article may be downloaded from Bristol City Council’s website at www.bristol-city.gov.uk or directly from this link: Full Report
Summary
Internet surveys are no longer just for website visitors. They can be used in a wide variety of consultation exercises, both internal and external. Online interviewing offers many advantages over other methods:
- Attractive questionnaires incorporating graphics, images and logos.
- Easy for participants to follow, thanks to on-screen text substitutions, routing and error correction.
- Less intrusive: people can participate when it suits them best.
- No data entry required.
- More complete and more accurate data.
- Can publish the results on the web too.
Snap Internet brings the important Snap principle that you take care of the whole survey process, from start to finish, and applies it to web interviewing. The same tools are used to set up Internet surveys as for conventional pen-and-paper surveys. There is seamless integration between the web data, which get loaded automatically, and the familiar Snap analysis and charting tools.
November 2000