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Run a club or society? Here's how your tech can make it easier
In The Club
27 April – 10 May 2022 • Issue 630 Next issue: Merge your member lists using ExcelRun a survey with Google Forms
O
ne of the best ways to learn what
your members want is to ask them in
an online survey. It gives them a chance
to consider their views, and reply in their
own time. For simplicity and options, the
surveys offered by Google Forms are hard
to beat. In our example, a Second World
War history club (‘War Bores’) is asking
members which topics to cover.Decide how members
can answer questions
Visit https://forms.google.com and you’ll
see some templates to help you get
started, but we’re going to click the Blank
icon to create our own. Enter a title for
your form at the top of the page, and
then click Untitled Question (^1 in our
screenshot right).
Click the ‘Multiple choice’ dropdown
menu and you’ll see the full range of
options for questions. These include
‘Short answer’ (a small open text box)
and Paragraph (a bigger box for longer,
open feedback); ‘Multiple choice’ (only
one answer can be selected); Checkboxes
(multiple answers can be selected);
and Dropdown (one answer from a
dropdown menu). There’s also the ‘File
upload’ option, which lets respondents
upload a file.
For ranked feedback, there’s a Linear
scale (you set the maximum and
minimum value, for questions such as,
‘Out of five how satisfied are you?’). A
multiple-choice grid lets you do
something similar, but you create the
rows and columns. Respondents then
pick one answer per row.
For example, if we want to get feedback
on a few aspects of a club, we could
create columns 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, then
use Rows for the parts we want feedback
on. Finally, the Checkbox grid is similar,
but respondents can select as many
answers as they want.
When you’re done, click the Plus icon^2
to add a new question, or the two
rectangles at the bottom of the menu^3 to
add a new section. These are web pages
that contain sections, so you could for
example have one for satisfaction withthe club, and one for getting ideas of
what to talk about.
Click ‘Settings’ at the top to adjust
how the survey works. For example, if
you use the ‘Limit to 1 response’ option,
respondents have to sign in to their
Google accounts to fill out the survey,
but they can reply once only.
When you’re done, click the
Send button to start distributing the
survey. You have two options: send
by email, entering the email
addresses of the people you want
to send the survey to; or click the
link option to get a direct link to
the survey, letting you share how
you want (eg, by social media or
WhatsApp).See your answers as charts
and in a spreadsheet
Click ‘Responses’ on your survey
to show the answers as charts.
Now click the Google Sheets icon
(^1 in our screenshot right) to
export the data to a spreadsheet
(cleverly, any new responses are
added automatically). With the
data in a spreadsheet, you can do a
bit more filtering. For example,
click Data, then ‘Create a filter’and you can see only the answers from
the most or least satisfied respondents
(hopefully there are more of the former!).
Or, in a similar way to Issue 629’s
column on using Excel to find the most
popular day for a meeting, you can use a
formula to find the most popular answer
to a question. In our example, the most
popular WW2 plane was the Lancaster
Bomber^2 , so we may want to plan more
around this.Use Google’s
options to decide
you how want
your members
to answer the
questions2
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You can see answers as charts, or click the Google
Sheets icon to see them in a spreadsheet2
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