Background

KU staff and students often want to conduct polls or surveys within KU, or within a unit or organization at KU. The polls or surveys provide input for making decisions, planning events, and learning others’ preferences and ideas, but they aren’t critical (like voting for a representative).

The most common poll/survey questions are multiple choice, where the poll taker selects a choice from a list of choices.

There are applications for this on the Internet, such as Google Forms and SurveyMonkey, but they all have limitations or unwanted features. Google Forms is clumsy and a returning visitor cannot see his previously submitted choices, but he can submit new choices if the form settings are set to allow it. Google Forms do not have a setting for automatic start and end date; the form creator must manually enable/disable responses.

SurveyMonkey has limits on free forms, including the number of survey items and number of responses.

Vision

For the KU community who want to conduct surveys and polls open to the community, and who may wish to specify starting/ending dates for the survey or poll, our product is an easy to use web application that provides ability to submit a choice on poll items, and view or modify one’s choice any time during the polling period.

Our product has a simple procedure for creating polls, and allows everyone to see the results of a poll or survey.

Additional Details

The opening and closing dates for each poll/survey question are optional. A question is not visible to web visitors before the opening date, and voting or modifying an existing vote is not allowed after the closing date, but the poll/survey and results can be viewed after the closing date.

Alternative Solutions

There are other free web-based applications for conducting polls and surveys. Two such products are:

• Google Forms - can have several types of questions including multiple choice, matrix, short answer, and free-form long answer. The form owner can manually enable/disable collecting responses and limit the scope to a Google organization.

• Survey Monkey - Very user-friendly, easy to share, can test the survey before sending it out live.