A church survey is a great way to get input from your congregation and find out what’s working and what’s not. Tony Morgan from Granger Community Church (yes, they’re the MyLameSexLife.com folks) shares an all-church survey Granger put together. Sometimes it helps to see what others are asking and how they’re wording questions.
Surveys can’t answer everything, but they can give some insight. I’d also recommend Survey Monkey for online surveys. While an online survey might not work for a church-wide survey since your sample will be heavily high-tech, at least the tallying and nifty graphs are automatic.
jessica
February 21, 2006
I would also recommend Survey Monkey. We just did an all-church survey with them and had a fantastic response, especially being able to just send an e-mail out to our e-mail list that took them directly to it.
Jim McGee
February 21, 2006
As a professional researcher, I prefer using Survey Monkey to a lot of the alternatives. It’s great for church surveys if you have an email list or want to drive traffic through a pop-up invitation on your web site.
I recommend the subscription option over the freebie, even if you’re just doing a one-time survey. It’s well worth the $20 (per month, unsubscribe at will) to be able to brand the survey, redirect people to your web site at the end, create skip patterns and filter/share/download results.
If your survey doesn’t have sensitive content, the list management tool is great. It allows you to track responses and send reminders to non-respondents. Response rates will often increase by half with a well-written reminder.
There are also tools available for doing online focus groups as well. The interaction can be really good for getting feedback on potential changes and other issues that need more attention than a multiple-choice question will provide. They are more costly than doing surveys, but I and others who subscribe to an online focus group service can help you do it on the cheap.
Noel
February 23, 2006
Thanks so much for the link to Granger’s survey. We are doing our annual survey this weekend and while it was too late to change ours, we will definitely steal some of the ideas for next year.
In case anyone is interested, you can download a copy of our’s here: http://www.noelheikkinen.com/resources/riverviewsurvey.pdf
Dwight
July 20, 2007
To anyone that may be interested, there is also http://www.mychurchsurvey.com – a similar website that has been specifically designed to allow churches to create online surveys, deploy them through an email, or on a church website, and analyze the results online. The charts are awesome, and their pre-built surveys are all church specific. Pre-built surveys can also be edited. They are also only $20/month.
kevin sutherland
July 8, 2009
hey i am looking for some practical tips in doing a neighborhood survey, as well as a sample of what some of you have done. The granger link in the post seems to be a dead link. any help :D
foibles
December 2, 2009
I was using surveymonkey but I’ve outgrown it. It’s cute but zoomerang has more features
http://snurl.com/monkeyzoom