Need to ask your members what they think? Run a volunteer sign-up, a booking form or a feedback questionnaire? You don't need a paid survey tool. Every Voice website comes with a full Surveys app built in, and it's completely free.

We've just given Surveys another big upgrade, with new question types, show/hide questions, charts of your results and much more, so it's a great time to take a look.

Why not just use a free survey site?

Plenty of online survey tools have a free plan, but they usually come with strings attached: a cap on how many questions you can ask or how many responses you can see, their branding all over your form, and the nice features kept behind a monthly subscription.

With Voice there's none of that:

• No limits on the number of surveys, questions or responses.
• No adverts and no "upgrade now" nags.
• It lives on your own website, in your own colours, rather than sending people off somewhere else.
• Your data stays with you. Responses aren't shared with an outside survey company.

What can it do?

Quite a lot, it turns out!

Ask questions in lots of ways

• The everyday types: short and long text answers, numbers, email addresses, dates, yes/no, drop-downs, radio buttons, checkboxes and file uploads.
• Rating scales: a row of numbered buttons, with up to 10 points and your own label at each end, such as Very poor and Excellent.
• Likert scales: answers from Strongly disagree to Strongly agree. Pick a ready-made scale for agreement, satisfaction, frequency or importance, or type your own.
• Net Promoter Score: the classic "How likely are you to recommend us?" question, scored from 0 to 10.
• Ranking: people drag the choices into order, or use up and down buttons. Ask them to rank everything, or just their top few.
• Image or video choice: every answer is a picture or a video, which is perfect for voting on a logo design or choosing a favourite photo.
• Matrix questions: a grid of questions with the same answers, great for "rate each of these" questions. You can use a ready-made scale, and allow several answers per row. On a phone, each row becomes its own neat box.

Show the right questions to the right people

• Show/hide questions: only show a question when it's relevant. For example, ask "What went wrong?" only if someone gave a rating of 2 or less. If the two questions are on the same page, the follow-up appears as soon as the answer is given.
• Conditional sections: skip a whole section of questions. So if someone says they're a volunteer, they get the volunteer questions, and everyone else skips them.
• Multi-page surveys: split a long survey into sections, each on its own page if you like. People can move back and forth with Next and Previous without losing their answers, and you can add a progress bar so they can see how far they've got.
• Save and finish later: people can stop part-way and carry on another time, even if they aren't logged in. They get a private link that they can bookmark or email to themselves.

Fit it around your site

• Embed a survey in any page: drop a form right into a page on your site, such as a membership form on your "Join Us" page. Longer surveys work too, and people stay on your page as they go through them.
• A thank-you page that does more: show people a copy of their answers, let them email themselves a copy, or show the results so far, like a poll (totals only, and never anything typed in). Or send them to a page of your choice instead.
• Opening and closing dates: set a survey to open and close automatically. Outside those dates visitors see a friendly message instead of the form.
• Spam protection: public surveys show a CAPTCHA to visitors who aren't logged in.

Build it with confidence

• Preview as you build: click through your survey exactly as a respondent would, without saving anything. Conditional sections and show/hide questions work in the preview too, so you can test every route.
• Change your mind: you can change the type of many questions after you've created them, even once people have started answering. Voice tells you how many answers will be kept before anything changes.
• Copy a survey: reuse last year's questionnaire as a starting point.

Seeing the results

Responses are stored safely on your site, where you can:

• See a summary of each question, with a bar chart showing how many people picked each answer, and what percentage that is.
• See average scores for scale questions, your overall Net Promoter Score, and the average position of each choice in a ranking question.
• See how the answers to number questions spread out, along with the average, middle, lowest and highest values.
• Click a number on a chart to see who gave that answer.
• Look through each person's full response.
• Download everything as a spreadsheet (CSV) to open in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
• Get an email when someone responds, either straight away or as an hourly or daily round-up.
• Delete all the responses in one go when a campaign is over, so you're not holding on to personal data you no longer need.

Collecting something sensitive?

For things like safeguarding reports or health information, you might rather not keep responses on a website at all. You can switch off Store Responses and have each response emailed straight to a list of people instead. Each person on the list gets their own copy, so nobody sees anyone else's email address.

Getting started

If you already have a Voice site, go to Content > Applications in your admin pages and enable Surveys. The Surveys documentation walks you through building your first one, and you can ask questions in the forums.

Don't have a Voice site yet? Voice provides free websites for charities, voluntary organisations and community groups. Have a look at all the other website features, then create your free website.