Towson University’s Outreach Blog

Dawn

Adventurous is not a word people would use to describe me.  Solid, dependable, typical, predictable… they would work.  I usually like to do things the same way. If I know how to do something, why try something different.  Not a good mantra when you work in a tech industry. So when a client approached us this summer about trying to get a lot of information, from a lot of different people, who are not close by, in a short amount of time, the Center for Applied IT (CAIT) decided that our standard interview method may not be the best approach.  Here was an opportunity to try something different, and we decided to take a leap of faith using a survey tool.

For this project, CAIT needed to quickly identify IT resources overseen by one of the counties. Time was of the essence so we thought how could we get the information, eliminate or greatly reduce data entry and be able to manipulate the data easily. After looking at some of the commercially available tools, we found that a simple survey tool would do the trick. Aaron Guy at the Center for Professional Studies (CPS), another Division of Economic and Community Outreach (DECO) unit, came to our rescue since they were currently using a survey tool that would easily meet our needs.

After obtaining the client’s approval, Lisa Walker, Bill Hansman and I set to work. The tool allowed us to ask questions that could be answered using text boxes, radio buttons (for a single entry) or check boxes (for multiple entries). We developed questions, organized our survey and launched it in only a few weeks.

Launching the survey was simple too. We provided our client with the URL and some basic instructions.   Our immediate feedback was minimal. A few questions, but for the most part the users found it easy to use and the questions to be straightforward. Next, we downloaded the information into an Excel spread sheet and now we are working to discover all the information our survey results hold.

No new adventure is complete without discovering some pitfalls. Here is what we have learned so far:

1. Fewer more targeted questions would have been better, making the survey more concise
2. Make every question mandatory would have been helpful
3. Limit free form text box use, because some participants became a bit wordy, making it hard to discern facts.

Overall, we really enjoyed developing the survey. It was fun to create the questions and to then reap the rewards of our efforts through the data we retrieved, data that we did not have to manually enter!

Since our first survey experience, we have upgraded the tool we are using and are looking for more opportunities to leverage this new skill.   I can’t wait to share this tool with another client and to survey again!