Nowadays there are quite a number of online survey platforms available in the Internet, many allow you to sign up a free trial account which will restrict you on the features and functions available, and most importantly, on these 3 crucial quotas:
- The maximum number of surveys you can have.
- The maximum number of questions per survey.
- The maximum number of responses you can accept.
SoGoSurvey allows you to sign up a free for life
Basic Plan account with 15 surveys, 30 questions and 125 responses, which is pretty generous compared with most of its competitors. With these combination of quotas, you can probably run 1 or 2 serious online surveys and perform in-depth analysis to the responses using its built-in reporting tool.
If you are a student and your coursework requires you to conduct surveys, good news is you can request to upgrade from
Basic Plan to
Student Plan for free, provided you've fulfil some simple requirements (click
here or
here for more detail).
With a
Student Plan account, you'll get all the features and functions available to their
Plus Plan (click
here or
here for more detail of available plans and their comparison), and most importantly, you can now conduct unlimited surveys with unlimited questions and receive unlimited responses, for free. This will enable you to make use of SoGoSurvey to conduct all the surveys needed in your entire course of study.
If you need to use more advanced features and functions, you can also further upgrade to
Pro or
Enterprise plan with big student discount. Beside students, SoGoSurvey also provides special discount for academic institutions, universities and non-profit organizations.
There are at least 3 steps in using SoGoSurvey. First, you
design your survey, either creating from scratch, or copy from existing, or making use of ready made template in Survey Bank.
Then, you
publish your survey and
distribute your invitation to your target respondents. You can have each of the target respondents having a unique URL to access to your online survey, or to use a shared general URL. After you've collected some data, you can start analysing the responses using the
Report tool.
You can also
export the data to your own computer for your own keeping and analysing/reporting using your own tool such as MS Excel, SPSS, PSPP, etc.
Beside putting up surveys with Survey Tool, there are also step-by-step Poll Tool and Assessment Tool for you to conduct poll and/or assessment, which structure is less complicated than a survey.
SoGoSurvey's designer is WYSIWYG type. You can create single-lingual, bi-lingual or even multi-lingual surveys with it. You can organize your survey questions into separate pages. The survey pages will show nicely on browser screen, tablet screen and smartphone screen, which you can preview in the designer.
Simple branching of questions is available in Basic Plan. More complex branching is available in Student Plan, Plus Plan and onwards.
You will see a green colour keyhole icon for all the features and functions not available in your current plan. For example, available and unavailable question types for Basic Plan is as below.
Once you successfully upgraded to Student Plan or Plus Plan, your available question types will become as below.
With the Student Plan / Plus Plan, you are able to generate 2-level or 3-level cross tab reports, which is very handy in analysing data with relationship, particularly when linked with demographics, such as "how many females agreed with this?" and even "how many females at age 18-24 agreed with this?".
Some remarkable features in SoGoSurvey that I like including:
- It has an option to allow participants to print out a copy of their own survey response.
- Even after the survey has gone live, minor editing to the survey, such as making change in wording, is still possible.
- You can customize your survey's looks-and-feels by using the Visual Settings.
- It can generate beautiful reports, enabling you to perform in-depth analysis to your data collected.