Survey Monkey

Basic information

  • URLhttps://www.surveymonkey.com 
  • Cost: Free Basic account, and fee-based versions for individuals and enterprise with various features
  • Open source: No

How to use this tool for use/reuse assessment

Point-of-use surveys

Survey Monkey allows a practitioner to create a pop-up survey or pop-up survey invite (called “Website Collectors”) by embedding code provided by the software into a webpage, and also allows practitioners to determine the percent of visitors to whom the pop-up survey is shown. However, the pop-ups can only be triggered by use of specific webpages. Pop-ups cannot be triggered by a user clicking download links for digital objects or undertaking any other sort of action.

Surveys

Survey Monkey is a robust survey platform available for individuals and at the enterprise level for institutions at a reasonable price. 

Ethical guidelines

Practitioners should follow the practices laid out in the “Ethical considerations and guidelines for the assessment of use and reuse of digital content.” The Guidelines are meant both to inform practitioners in their decision-making, and to model for users what they can expect from those who steward digital collections.

Additional guidelines for responsible practice

Practitioners should understand the ways in which respondents’ and contacts’ personal data is shared within the software and should limit access to personal and sensitive data according to institutional privacy policies and best practices. 

Contacts can include Custom Data as part of an Email Invitation Collector. Custom Data fields may contain private data. Examples include race, age, or salary, as well as survey responses from a prior survey that are associated with names and email addresses. If Custom Data is sensitive, delete the Contacts and the data association once they are no longer needed for survey deployment. 

Survey Monkey allows surveys and survey results to be shared among the members of Teams. When sharing a survey with a Team, Survey Monkey allows the practitioner to select which functionality will be shared. There are three access levels that can be set:  Primary Admin and Full Access User are the highest roles and have full access to the survey design, collected responses and analysis; Contributor/Analyst role can only view the survey and responses, but can have full access to analyzing the results; and people outside of the Team can only view.  By default, every Team member is able to view responses at their assigned access (as long as their seat type’s permissions allow such access). If collaborators are only meant to assist in building or reviewing the survey instrument without access to the data, the survey should be shared without the ability to see collected responses in order to protect privacy.

Contacts cannot be shared between groups of staff in enterprise Survey Monkey accounts.

Strengths

  Point-of-use surveys

  • Cost is a strength. The ability to create pop-up surveys and pop up survey invitations (called “Website Collectors”) is included in even the free version of Survey Monkey. While the free version of Survey Monkey has other limitations — such as the number of responses visible — the cost of a paid Survey Monkey account is far less than some of the other major survey competitors, such as Qualtrics. The affordable Team Advantage account is on par with the cost of a standard Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) account.
  • The process of creating survey forms is simple and can be done in just a few minutes.

  Surveys

  • Survey Monkey provides a robust survey platform at a reasonable cost.
  • It offers more functionality and features than Google Forms, but lacks the granular analytics and advanced features than Qualtrics. Given the high cost of Qualtrics, Survey Monkey is a good option if an institution does not already have a site license to Qualtrics, but needs a more robust tool than Google Forms.

Weaknesses

  Point-of-use surveys

  • Pop-ups can only be triggered by opening certain webpages; they cannot be triggered by a user downloading digital objects or other types of actions.
  • The pop-up survey will have Survey Monkey branding unless you have the highest cost subscription (which would still be substantially less than Qualtrics).

  Surveys

  • The free version of Survey Monkey is very constrained, with a limited number of responses you’re able to collect; expect to need the relatively cost-effective paid version to have the full set of tools you’ll need.
  • The survey will have Survey Monkey branding unless you have the highest cost subscription (which would still be substantially less than Qualtrics).

Alternative tools

  Point-of-use surveys

Note: many survey platforms provide pop-up survey capabilities. Two other examples are featured in this toolkit.

  Surveys

Note: there are dozens of survey platforms. Only three other examples are featured in this toolkit.

Used for these methods

Alternative tools

  Point-of-use surveys

  Surveys

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