*LimeSurvey shines as open source product.
Want to know what percentage of people still think Michael Jackson is guilty as was charged back in 2005 despite the revelations that one of the accusers admitted lying? Maybe you’d like to find out whether the idea of the president having an “Internet kill switch” is a good one? You can, as I did, run a simple survey: I used twtpoll for both the Jackson and Kill Switch questions.
The twtpoll service, which is free, is very simple to use and I found (not to my surprise) that 50% of respondents thought and still think Jackson was guilty while only 5% had changed their minds (admittedly the sample was rather small at a total of 20 votes).
As for the Kill Switch question (which got a better response of 51 total votes), those against the president being able to shut the ‘Net down (both “No, seems like a bad idea” and “No, definitely not”) were an overwhelming majority at 91%.
In the case of twtpoll the service was designed for publishing via Twitter which is very useful for quick surveys – of course the down side is that the survey results are statistically flawed (as the respondents are a self-selecting sample of Internet users who may differ significantly from the general population on any given topic so the results are consequently biased). That said, as a rough snapshot the results of these “straw polls” are good enough for many purposes.
An area where these services are actually valuable for gaining “hard” data is inside organizations where the demographics of the user population and therefore their deviation from the general population is known. These services can also be valuable for consensus building but it is important to ensure that when there’s anything sensitive about the survey topic (for example, electing a staff board representative) the respondent’s anonymity is guaranteed.
Simple survey services like twtpoll (also check out YourFreePoll) are great for off-the-cuff questions but what if you want to conduct a big complicated survey; a multiple question, multipart survey with lots of different question types (multiple choice, text, radio buttons, scales, and so on)? Whether this is for the real world or just within your corporation you’re going to need a much more sophisticated survey platform.
I recently had just such a need and while there are any number of commercial survey services that are very good (for example, PollDaddy is excellent) I found a free, open source survey system that is really impressive: LimeSurvey.
LimeSurvey has an enormous feature set rivaling the best of the commercial services. These features include:
* Unlimited number of surveys at the same time.
* Unlimited number of questions in a survey (only limited by your database).
* Unlimited number of participants to a survey.
* Multi-lingual surveys.
* User-management.
* 20 different question types with more to come.
* WYSIWYG HTML editor.
* Quotas management.
* Integration of pictures and movies into a survey.
* Creation of a printable survey version.
* Conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (Skip Logic / Branching).
* Re-usable editable answer sets.
* Ready-made importable questions.
* Assessment surveys.
* Anonymous and Not-Anonymous survey.
* Open and closed group of participant surveys.
* Optional public registration for surveys.
* Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by e-mail.
* Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time.
* Cookie or session based surveys.
* Template editor for creating your own page layout.
* Extended and user-friendly administration interface.
* Back-office data entry possibility.
* Survey expiration dates for automation.
* Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV, PDF, SPSS, R, queXML and MS Excel format.
* Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility.
* Screen Reader Accessibility.
* W3C compliance.
That is a better feature set than any commercial survey service I’ve looked at!
LimeSurvey is written in PHP and the base requirements are MySQL 4.1.0 or later OR Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or later OR Postgres 8.1 or later and PHP 5.x or later with mbstring, the mysql4 or mysql5 PHP library, sessions, and pcre support. Oh, and a measly 40MB of disk space.
Installation is quite straightforward and the only thing that I can criticize is that setting up a survey is somewhat more complex than it needs to be – the user interface is “intuitive” until you’ve worked with it for a few hours (if the developers adopted a user interface along the lines of PollDaddy’s there would be nothing to touch LimeSurvey).
But as if that weren’t enough a hosted version of LimeSurvey called LimeService is available that allows you to run an unlimited number of surveys with unlimited questions and collect up to 25 responses per month at no charge (they have a formula for determining what counts as a response).
While that isn’t enough responses for any serious survey the pricing for more responses is very reasonable starting at $0.10 each up to 100 responses and dropping to $0.04 for 5,000 responses.
It is also worth noting that LimeService is a German company (hence some of the mangled English on the site) which means that EEC privacy laws are applicable, which could be a good thing for your user’s confidence if your surveys involve very personal data collection.
I’ve just started working with LimeSurvey and LimeService and I am really impressed – the software and the hosted service live up to their goals and offer, by far, the best combination of features and customizability you can find in survey software. Recommended.
