Online Tools for Forms, Surveys and more

April 2012: We use a number of online tools in our marketing and administrative efforts and thought we would share our favorites. All of these integrate with various other third party companies to add capabilities.

Wufoo – an application for building forms. We use it for seminar registration and collecting information from clients and prospects. The basic plan is free, but you are limited to 100 entries per month. But – the free version is certainly enough to get you started and help figure out if it will do what you want it to do! We’ve found the email support to be great – you get answers back within a couple of hours. We have a plan that is priced at $29.95/month. (Note from Ellen Jennings – I also use Wufoo for some non-profit organizations that I volunteer with and have found that the payment integration works great. Non-profits get a 50% discount.)

MailChimp – a newsletter design and mailing application. We use MailChimp to send out this newsletter, our Healthcare IT Newsletter and various seminar invitations. Using a third party to send out any emails that are going to a large group of subscribers is highly recommended. MailChimp takes care of maintaining the list and tracking results.

Survey Monkey & Survey Gizmo – internet applications for surveys. We’ve used both of these to for surveys, quizzes and to gather information as part of the RFP process. Both work well and are easy to use. Survey Gizmo had more capabilities to score results at the time, but that may have changed in the last few months.

As a note, there are also free versions for most of these applications but most of the free versions are supported by ads.