A few months ago I told y’all how I just adore WordPress. In that context I mentioned that I’m a walking evangelist for two web apps, one of them being the big W. The other one I simply love also starts with a W.
It’s the embeddable survey application with the really ridiculous name, Wufoo.com. Just like you can embed a YouTube video or other widgets into a web page, you can embed Wufoo’s forms into your association’s web pages, blog posts or wikis.
“Why is Wufoo any better than, say, Zoomerang or Surveymonkey?” you ask. From a user experience standpoint, you do know it’s preferable to keep your members on your website to do the things you want them to do, right? Send them off to a Zoomerang or Surveymonkey site to complete a survey, and they are experiencing things that you have less control over. This is Wufoo’s killer app: You don’t have to go off-site to complete the surveys.
Wufoo has a lot of the same features as Zoomerang and Surveymonkey, but I’ll shoot straight with ya: They have more features than Wufoo. Wufoo definitely holds its own, though. You can use it to collect and process credit card payments, it automatically logs IP addresses, it has a drag-n-drop survey editor, and they are rolling out new bells and whistles all the time.
We use Wufoo to collect responses for our social media in real estate research initiative and we’ve also used it to coordinate voting in a March Madness style battle royale of real estate blogs. And every time someone wants to complete the poll or survey, we get the pageviews and the opportunity to engage them.
You can try Wufoo for free, then upgrade and downgrade whenever you want.
Here’s an example of a form that’s currently deployed.
Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive
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Hey, great write-up on Wufoo. They have one of the best user interfaces around. You are also right, it is not about the features, it is about the experience and Wufoo definitely got it right!
No doubt. I start my Cool Web 2.0 Tools speeches with surveys and this one always elicits a lot of interest.