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Is there a difference between surveys and polls?

Fri, October 19th, 2007 by Brenna Holmes | 3 comments

While research isn’t most people’s favorite thing to do – it is one of mine Dr. Kinsey, I swear! – the Internet has made it exceptionally easier and actually more fun. And we all know that it is an essential part of any successful campaign, whether it’s brand marketing, issue advocacy, or running for public office. My favorite types of research are surveys and polls and it just so happens that these are the two that are the most Internet friendly as well!

If 70% of American adults – 141 million – are already online (Pew, 2006) and this number is on the rise, then why not use this wonderfully convenient tool to reach our audiences and do some message testing, some A-B comparisons. We should take the few minutes to utilize a tool that will pay attention to those we say we care about, those we are trying to reach, those we want to motivate into action. They can and are willing to provide truly valuable information at just a click of a mouse.

You may ask, “Is there a difference between surveys and polls?” Indeed there is. Polls are quick and dirty, short questionnaires – often with only one question – and always use multiple-choice as the answering method, surveys on the other hand, are longer, more in-depth – sometimes probing – and make use of the various question/answer styles, including open-ended, and the five types of closed-ended questions: Likert-scales, ordinal rankings, categorical, numerical, and of course multiple-choice.

But how do I know which type to use?

Source: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/surveyquest/index.htm

Now that we know the difference between polls and surveys and we know when to use each type of question, what tools are out there on the World Wide Web for us to avail ourselves of?

At this moment there are many free, low and high cost tools, software, hardware, and of course – my favorites – Internet hosted applications that won’t take any downloading at all! A Google search for “online surveys” brings back over 54 million results. Results include providers like Constant Contact, Question Pro, Key Survey, and my much loved, Survey Monkey – because who doesn’t like the idea of a monkey running around the internet collecting answers at your beck and call!

Though seriously, Survey Monkey is a truly amazing low cost tool that allows you to create and publish custom surveys in minutes with all sorts of personalizable extras. The design, collection, tracking, and results analysis functions are continuously improving, they work to stay cutting edge, and its ease of use! Come on, a monkey could do it! This makes it REALLY nice for the rest of us, who don’t have loads of time to create and conduct the research let a lone learn one more new technology.

I’m also currently quite obsessed with the Facebook polls feature. Facebook in general is on my top 10 list for almost everything, but this polls feature is fantastic! Developed by the Facebook staff, it’s not actually an application like Groups, Super Wall, Pirates vs. Ninjas, or iConcur. If you scroll down to the bottom of your homepage or any ones’ profile page you’ll see a little link in the utility navigation called – duh – “polls”. Click here to come to the polls page and learn more, take part in a sponsored poll, and of course, create your own.

A Facebook poll – as you may have guessed – is only a single question, multiple-choice poll, but what is truly amazing is that not only the fact that your poll can be randomly broadcast into the newsfeeds of the over 45 million Facebook users nationwide, but that you can use demographic information people put in their profiles to filter who sees and thus takes your poll(s). Want to target only Boise, Idaho residents? Just females? 25-34 year-olds? How about those who list Harry Potter as one of their favorite books? You can. Right now Facebook only allows you to select a single filter, but hopefully in the near future we’ll be able to focus our targets by cross filtering as well (hint hint Facebook gurus).

Now this wonderful feature isn’t free, but it isn’t that pricey either. You choose the maximum responses and how much you want to pay per response (ranges from $.25 - $1.00), the higher you pay the more newsfeeds your poll is in and the faster you get results. And the results are practically instantaneous.

So I say have fun with the research you know you should be doing and take advantage of the plethora of revolutionary tools that are floating out there in the Internet ether just waiting for you to grab a hold, type some questions, and click send!

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