If a Million Primates Design a Million Surveys...

...eventually one of them will create the Gallup Poll. But with less time and fewer chances to get it right, the average animal advocate needs easy-to-use research tools. Enter Survey Monkey, a familiar and commonly used tool among advocates. In the past year I’ve been invited to complete about a dozen Survey Monkey questionnaires and, unfortunately, some of them were poorly designed and written. While I’m excited that advocates are using surveys more often, I think we can do better.

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Tell us what tools you use with our 3-minute survey!

Just because you can create a survey quickly and easily using one of many online tools doesn’t mean that you necessarily should. These tools can be a great resource for small studies or ad hoc polls among your members or employees. But they also make it a little too tempting for advocates to throw together a survey, send it out to fifty of their friends, and then congratulate themselves on doing research for their project or campaign.

As I have written in the past, survey design is as much art as it is science. All spoken or written language carries nuances, unintended or otherwise, and almost all survey questions contain some bias. Creating a solid questionnaire isn’t easy, no matter how simple Survey Monkey might make it seem. Choosing the right people to survey to get a representative sample of your target audience can be even more challenging. Again, these are not major issues for small or less important survey projects, but they need to be addressed for bigger studies in support of important programs or campaigns.

I should disclose my own bias on the topic: HRC offers an online survey tool for animal advocates, based on the open-source and award-winning LimeSurvey platform. It’s not a replacement for Survey Monkey because it requires having HRC program your survey, but for more sophisticated projects it offers a range of features that tools like Survey Monkey can’t match, including:

• Ability to protect surveys with unique passwords for all respondents
• Ability for users to save responses and resume later (great for long surveys)
• Unlimited questions and question groups and more than 20 question types
• Fully customizable design including access to HTML and CSS code
• Ability to set respondent quotas based on answers to key questions
• Surveys utilize the animal-related base URL of “humaneresearch.org”
• We provide a flat, sliding-scale price per project with no monthly costs

To see an example of one of HRC’s surveys – and give us your quick thoughts on survey tools in general – please take our very brief survey. It’s completely anonymous and will only take about 3 minutes.

Take the survey: http://surveys.humaneresearch.org/index.php?sid=46679

Finally, if you’d like to go deeper on the topic of survey design, check out the following HRC blogs:

• Survey Design 101: http://www.humanespot.org/node/2585
• Understanding Survey Results: http://www.humanespot.org/node/2644
• Understanding Survey Bias: http://www.humanespot.org/node/2700