I have used SurveyMonkey for committee work here at the library, out of absolute necessity - there is no way in Circ to find everyone in Circ, much less find them and have time to ask them a number of questions. There were a few obstacles, such as:
- a limit on the number of questions (no one told me the lib has a Pro account!),
- a default setting that disallows the survey to be answered twice at the same computer (not helpful for a department of nomads), and
- difficultly in extracting results with a basic account (too bad I'm smarter than you SurveyMonkey!).
These problems were not too extremely difficult to overcome and overall the survey proved to be a very valuable for getting opinions and ideas from my coworkers. It did leave me feeling like the free Basic Accounts are designed in part to make users feel like the paid accounts surely must be better.
The other online survey options appear to target many different types of organizations. PollDaddy and SurveyMonkey are the hip, lite versions, QuestionPro seems pretty Pro and Zoomerang is juuuusttt right...or just somewhere in the middle. I was interested to read that QuestionPro offers its Professional version free to non-profits willing to post a link to the QuestionPro website from the website of their organization. Pretty nice of them.
The things I would do differently if I needed to use SurkeyMonkey again are using the library's account (granted it's available to us) and supplying better feedback after the results are collected and utilized, something mentioned in the "8 tips" article.
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