Online surveys

About online surveys

Surveys are an everyday part of education and research; from gathering organisational data or capturing research evidence, right through to analysing results and creating impact in presenting your findings.

They provide you with the information and answers you need to help you and your organisation make decisions, prove or disprove a theory, instruct and inform future strategy.

88% of UK higher education institutions use online surveys
(based on current online survey licence holder data, October 2019)

How this service helps you

Online surveys provides the functionality you need to create, run and analyse surveys across your entire organisation. Use them to gather vital organisational data and help you make better informed decisions about the future direction of your organisation.

Continued use and rerunning your surveys year-on-year will help you to create a rich dataset of longitudinal data and enables your organisation to see how far you’ve progressed.

The online surveys service has organisation-wide appeal and can be used by everyone, including:

Researchers who need to capture essential participant feedback
Support teams gathering staff opinions and student voices
Across departments to evaluate recent changes or identify improvements

“It really does deliver easy to produce and distribute surveys, and fast and effective ways to extract your data. Whenever there’s a problem the support team at Jisc are the most responsive team I’ve ever come across.”

Emma Street, research and evaluation co-ordinator, data and student analytics, The Open University

Key features

Built for education and research

As powerful as other commercial survey tool providers, online surveys was made specifically for education and research institutions with better capabilities for surveying in the sector.

As simple or as sophisticated as you need

You can create surveys as simple or as complex as you need. There are a range of question types and formats as well as piping, routing, survey access control and email distribution (with a sending capacity of up to 5,000 as standard on project and organisation licences). This enables you to capture high-value, quality results, which give real meaning to your data.

Collaboration for greater results

Using benchmarking services* you get greater returns on your data. Benchmarking surveys are developed in collaboration with other organisations - you develop and distribute the same survey across the group and collect results.

We create your unique benchmarking groups and combine datasets to produce anonymised benchmarking reports, as well enabling access to an institution's own data. These reports help organisations understand their position, make comparisons in key areas, recognise common trends, understand differences and highlight areas of improvement.

*Benchmarking services incur additional costs.

Simple pricing and simple sign up

Online surveys provides three simple licence types and price points which work with all users and budgets.

Our free 30-day trial makes it possible to test out the features of the service before making a financial commitment and the smooth trial to full account conversion means you keep your trial surveys, data and access without any interruption.

Trusting us with your data

The security of your data is paramount. With online surveys, data is secure and strict information security standards are followed (ISO27001) and your data is processed in compliance with GDPR.

The easy-to-use account settings ensure that organisations can manage users quickly and efficiently, whilst ensuring the integrity of data and maintaining high standards of data security.

Responsive help and support services

Our help and support pages take you through all the stages of design, distribution and analysis functions and the support team are available to answer your questions and resolve your problems.

Start using online surveys

ISO certification

This service is included within the scope of our ISO9001 and ISO27001 certificates.