In a former job I used to produce a lot of web-based market research questionnaires. ¬It’s a task for which the web is ideal. Unlike a paper-based questionnaire, you can make your questionnaires full colour with interactivity, make sure that people complete questions, show or hide questions based on previous answers and above all, the data is already digitised, so you don’t have to get data keyed-in, introducing the risk of error.

If you get the basics right, you can send out an invitation to a mailing list, get great response rates and meaningful data within a few hours, often for less than a hundred pounds of gift vouchers and a bit of developer time. You can’t ask too much, but it’s amazing how much people are willing to tell you in exchange for being entered into a prize draw.

In my former job, the painful part of the process was setting up these questionnaires. We’d create a table in a database, hand-code a questionnaire, including validation and other rules, add a page to a password-protected area of the website where the client could download the data then test extensively. We thought about writing a smarter system, but we were so busy producing questionnaires that we never seemed to have the time.

As with so many things, the market has come to the rescue. I’ve had a couple of research projects for clients recently, so I’ve taken the opportunity to evaluate the web-based services that are out there. Two in particular that caught my eye were the QuestionPro and SurveyMonkey online survey tools.

QuestionPro has the fullest set of features, but unfortunately to do anything worthwhile, you need the Corporate Edition – which at US$99/month was a little more than my clients’ needs would justify. SurveyMonkey seemed a better alternative at US$200/year for their unlimited plan.

So far, the SurveyMonkey tool has been great. Surveys are very quick to set-up, it’s easy to create custom templates, add copy and questions, set which questions are mandatory, send email invitations and do all sorts of analysis of the stats online, as well as downloading it to Excel.

Of course you still have to get the basics right when you write the survey and interpret the results, but of course I’m happy to help with that. Here are a few tips:

• Keep it short, if it has to be long, split it across a few screens and show a progress bar so people don’t give up part way
• Use language that your audience will understand
• Make sure that your audience knows what you are talking about
• Give the survey an interesting title
• Write a punchy introduction to explain why you are asking the questions
• Provide a good incentive, it doesn’t have to be much, but a prize draw for £100 of Boots or Red Letter Days vouchers can be really effective
• Start with interesting questions
• Put your questions in a logical order
• Use closed-ended questions rather than open-ended ones
• Don’t write leading questions
• Avoid double negatives
• Balance rating scales so there’s room for both extremes
• Don’t make the list of choices too long
• Avoid questions where the audience will try to guess the answer
• Pre-test your survey