From the perspective of a practitioner, this paper presents an overview of the capabilities of Survey Monkey, an online assessment tool. The tool’s essential services and cost are outlined, and a comparison of many representative tools. We also give the reader the findings of a survey conducted with this tool and an assessment of its usefulness and potential for use in future usability studies.
What is Survey Monkey?
Survey Monkey is a web-based tool and hosting service that allows users to create and distribute surveys over the internet. According to the creators, Survey Monkey’s products, enterprise solutions, and integrations help over 335,000 firms handle daily difficulties such as improving customer experiences and employee retention (Farmer et. al, 2016). Organizations worldwide may use Survey Monkey to turn feedback into business intelligence that drives growth and innovation. The “Expert Solutions” suite claims to be able to do the following (Varela et. al, 2016):
- Ad creative analysis is a method of determining the success of advertising campaigns.
- Packaging Design Analysis: This guarantees that new packaging designs are shelf-ready.
- The aesthetic appeal of new logo designs is measured through logo design analysis.
- Analysis of messaging and claims: checks are messaging statements and taglines.
Costs
Each product has a different pricing structure. The Basic plan of Survey Monkey is free. However, it has restricted features. It comes with 15 different question kinds and over 20 different survey templates. You can make as many surveys as you want, but each has a limit of 10 questions and 100 respondents. Three paid subscription services are also available: STANDARD, ADVANTAGE and PREMIER. Prices are country-specific and in the USA range from $408 to $1188 annually (Rea et. al, 2021). The most popular plan, ADVANTAGE, includes unlimited questions, unlimited responses, custom survey design, skip-logic, and other advanced features such as random assignment for A/B testing, question and answer piping, question randomization, text analysis for open responses, and integration with SPSS. A PREMIER plan gives you “full brand control,” including unique research.net survey URLs and complete control over the survey’s appearance, including the ability to add a logo and trademark colors (Rea et. al, 2021). There are also two Business Plans: TEAM ADVANTAGE and TEAM PREMIER, which cost $25 and $75 per month (Rea et. al, 2021).
Sample Tools Review
Several tools could be used instead of Survey Monkey.
Hosted Survey is a platform that provides both self-service and full-service options. This means you may either make your instruments or hire their personnel to create and maintain them for you. Hosted survey advertises itself as suitable for both corporate and academic purposes. However, their pricing structure favors businesses with large budgets. The automated email invitation and responder tracking mechanism offered by Hosted Survey enables respondent tracking, reminders, and potentially higher response rates (Mara & Bogue, n.d.).
Survey is another online tool that lets you construct and evaluate surveys. The systematic approach for creating questions and the option to preview the question before completing it praised users. Prominent academic institutions and enterprises (Mara & Bogue, n.d.) mainly use Survey Z.
Inquisitive is a different kind of evaluation tool. Curious is a software program you purchase and use to develop your assessment instruments, rather than to give an internet interface for creating and managing assessment instruments. It then allows you to collect data by publishing your gadget on their website. Inquisite’s website claims that “only surveys show what customers think,” and the overall site markets itself as being primarily for corporate customers (Mara & Bogue, n.d.). It has a wide range of marketing research tools, such as robust survey customization, response tracking, and respondents.
The Results of the Conducted Survey
To evaluate this technique, I created a ten-question survey aimed at determining people’s television viewing patterns. Different services, such as multiple-choice options or placing the answers into a box, developed the questions. While conducting the survey, I found that the tool is simple, but it lacks the high level of flexibility that solutions like Inquisitive provide. Due to the free plan I was using, I was limited to a maximum of ten questions and could only post my survey via the URL and social media, again due to the plan’s conditions.
The responses collected were presented automatically in the form of charts with corresponding percentages depicting the noticeable trends when there were multiple-choice questions. According to the results, the respondents were mostly (45.83% of total) from the 40 years and above age group. Of the 24 people surveyed, 20 people were from the Mountain region, 83.33% in total. All people surveyed stated that they watch television. From which 62.5% spend from one to three hours on watching it. There were various portions when we tried to analyze which time of day people questioned prefer to watch TV. The tool has not examined the people’s responses to the questions with open boxes where people had to write their answers. However, the service provides sentiment analysis of that type of response once the plan is upgraded from the free option. The service has also offered that ordinary people spend about 1 minute and 43 seconds while taking the survey. What is wrong with the free plan is that the results cannot be downloaded free. The questionnaire and all the graphs and charts are provided in the Appendix.
This was an informal study in which a single product, Survey Monkey, was used to evaluate its effectiveness as a remote asynchronous evaluation tool by doing a little market research. It might be said that Survey Monkey can be used as an assessment tool if assessors arrange ahead of time to record user responses and opinions. For modest evaluation assignments, this tool is also a cost-effective and timesaving choice.
References
Farmer, R., Oakman, P., & Rice, P. (2016). A review of free online survey tools for undergraduate students. MSOR Connections, 15(1), 71-78.
Marra, R. M., & Bogue, B (n.d.). A Critical Assessment of Online Survey Tools.
Rea, A., Marshall, K., & Farrell, D. (2021). Capability of web-based survey software: An empirical review. American Journal of Business.
Varela, C., Ruiz, J., Andrés, A., Roy, R., Fusté, A., & Saldaña, C. (2016). Advantages and disadvantages of using the website SurveyMonkey in a real study: Psychopathological profile in people with normal weight, overweight and obesity in a community sample. E-methodology, 2016(3), 77-89.