Have you ever tried to set up a lunch or meeting with a group of friends or people from an organization but you end up having to send and receive lots of e-mails to figure out what the best time is for everyone? Well, there is a simple free web application that may help you. It’s called Doodle and can be found at http://doodle.ch/main.html.
Doodle allows you to find the best time for an event with a group of people. All you have to is to set up a “poll” with the date/times for an event. For example, you want to have a meeting with a group people and need to see if Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday at 5:30 is the best time for everyone. So you create a new poll with the choices being Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 5:30. Once you have completed the poll, you will be sent an e-mail from Doodle. You then forward a URL from that e-mail to all the people you want to attend that meeting. These people then in turn, click on the link which takes them to a web page with your poll. They just enter their name and click on the times they can make. Doodle creates a little chart with each person's answers which in this case is when they are available. The result is a visual chart of what each person selected and from that you can easily choose the best time for your meeting. This is very simple and easy to use. Thanks to Hae Okimoto and Jodi Ito of UH for letting me know about this web application.
Similar but more complex is trying to conduct a survey. Previously if you wanted to conduct a survey, you would write up your survey, print out a bunch of copies and then find people who want fill them out. From the surveys you collect, you need to tabulate the results and publish a report. Fairly easy to do but time consuming. Well another web application to the rescue. There are a few on-line survey services out there. Most have a free version and paid versions with more capabilities.
The one that I use is called SurveyMonkey - www.surveymonkey.com. SurveyMonkey allows you to easily create a custom on-line survey which can vary the questions depending on the answer the person gives. The survey can be sent to specific people and they can be restricted to respond only once or allowed to go back to change answers. The survey link can also be posted on a website or allowed to be answered by anyone.
The best part of the on-line survey is that the system automatically creates a report at any time of the surveys completed. You can even allow the people taking the survey to see the cummulative results after they have completed their survey. On-line survey makes it easy to survey one or 1000 people. Because the system does all the time consuming tabulation activity, anyone can create a survey whenever they like.
