My experience with online survey tools has primarily been as a recent graduate student. Typically we'd get an email through our school listserv with a link pointing us toward the survey (most often at Survey Monkey. For one of my library school courses, I was part of a group project that even crafted our own survey for research purposes. I can't quite remember but we used either Survey Monkey or Qualtrics. It was a really interesting process — something we, in fact, studied in the course itself — putting the survey together, taking great care with the wording, the order and the number of questions. It was a very good learning experience.
As for how MMPL surveys its patrons ... I believe it's the old-fashioned way, with focus groups and paper surveys. But I could definitely see us turning to online surveys, particularly since we've gotten a Facebook page recently in direct reaction to how many of our patrons are online, on Facebook. In fact, Facebook would be a great way to promote the survey. I'm not yet sold on audience survey tools like Poll Everywhere in the specific case of my patrons yet. Poll Everywhere requires audience members have a cell phone with texting capability, which assumes that the audience members are comfortable texting. If they don't have a cell phone, it requires audience members have access to a computer with an Internet connection in order to go the Poll Everywhere website to log their response.
The context I see us using the survey would most likely be in our computer classes — but that, in itself, would be a Catch-22, as these classes are designed to teach our patrons basic technology skills, the very skills they need to respond to the survey. So at this point I don't see the real-time audience surveys as playing a part in what we do, but that definitely doesn't rule it out for the future.
Photo by hfabulous available through a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.
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