Survey Tools for Nonprofits: Where the Real Cost Hides

The survey that answered half the question

This is the first post in our series on reviewing nonprofit spending. We start with surveys and announcements because almost every community organization uses them, and because the cost is easy to underestimate.

Picture a neighbourhood house that sends a fall program survey to its members. Ninety people respond. The results are clear: people want more evening English conversation classes. Then the executive director asks three follow-up questions. Did our regular participants answer, or mostly people we rarely see? Are the people asking for evening classes already coming to daytime programs? Do any of them donate?

The survey tool cannot answer any of those questions, because it does not know who your members are. Someone has to export the responses, open the membership spreadsheet, the attendance records, and the donation list, and match names by hand. That work is where the real cost of a survey tool hides.

Free, low-cost, and what you get

Most community organizations start with one of two options.

• Google Forms is free with a Google account. It is quick to build, easy to share by link, and sends responses to a Google Sheet. (Google also once offered a paid market research product called Google Surveys, but it was retired in 2022. When people say Google Surveys today, they usually mean Google Forms.)

• SurveyMonkey has a free Basic plan with tight limits: at the time of writing, 10 questions per survey and only 25 viewable responses. Paid plans add logic, exports, and more responses, and range from roughly US$30 per user per month on team plans to about US$99 per month for a single user on monthly billing.

• Microsoft Forms is often already included for organizations on Microsoft 365, and works much like Google Forms.

Any of these can collect answers well. For a one-time event feedback form, a free tool is often all you need. The trouble starts when survey results need to mean something alongside everything else you know about the people who answered.

The export, match, and clean-up loop

A survey tool is a separate island. Its responses arrive as rows in a spreadsheet, with whatever name and email each person typed. To connect those rows to your own records, staff usually have to:

1. 1

   Export the responses to a spreadsheet.

2. 2

   Match each respondent to a member record, often by name or email, which people spell and format differently every time.

3. 3

   Look up each matched person in attendance records to see how often they come to programs.

4. 4

   Check the donation list or receipting records to see who gives.

5. 5

   Clean up duplicates, blanks, and people who could not be matched at all.

6. 6

   Repeat all of it for the next survey.

If that takes a coordinator six hours per survey and you run four surveys a year, that is more than three working days spent copying and matching, not planning programs. It is the same pattern we described in why one family centre moved past Google Forms for sign-in: the tool is free, but every response still has to be retyped or reconciled somewhere else. Matching by name also creates duplicates, which we cover in how to prevent duplicate participant records.

Where your members' answers actually live

Survey responses often include names, emails, postal codes, and sometimes sensitive details like household income, language, or health needs. Free tools from US-based companies typically store that data outside Canada by default.

That does not automatically make a tool off-limits, but it is something your organization should decide on purpose rather than by accident. We explain what is at stake in why storing member sign-in data on US servers is a risk. Privacy law also differs by province: BC and Alberta have their own private-sector privacy acts, Quebec has Law 25, and PIPEDA applies in many other situations.

Announcements have the same blind spot

Announcements tend to follow the same path. A program change goes out through a form tool, a mailing list, a social post, and a printed notice at reception. Each list was built separately, so nobody is sure who actually got the message, and the family who switched phone numbers last month is still missing from one of them.

When announcements come from the same place as your participant records, the list is always as current as the records themselves. OpenCommunity's member portal, for example, lets participants view their visit history, update their own contact details, and receive announcements from their centre without downloading an app.

Questions to ask before you pay

When you review what you spend on survey and announcement tools, look past the monthly price and ask:

• Which questions do we need answered about respondents, not just from them?

• Can responses be linked to existing member or participant records without manual matching?

• How many staff hours does each survey take from launch to a usable summary?

• Where are responses stored, and who can access them?

• Are we paying for response limits, extra users, or features we rarely use?

• When a member updates their contact details, how many separate lists need to change?

Next in this series, we look at another line item that often sits in its own tool: email newsletters and the monthly bill that comes with them.