Digital News Journalist

The Tool: Web-based survey builder that lets users “rank” their choices
Why Use It: Great way to identify a “least worst” option instead of just a single favorite.

I was recently helping some students identify the best day for an event they were planning, and suggested they use some kind of “preferential voting system,” one that allowed users to “rank” their answers, rather than just submitting a single “best” response. The idea was to allow voters to create a list –from most preferred to least preferred — in order to find the group’s “least worst” option.

Why bother? Let me illustrate. Let’s say you and your colleagues want to go to lunch, but can’t decide between Chinese, Italian or Thai. Half the group loves Chinese but hates Italian, the other half loves Italian but hates Chinese, and everyone is just fine with Thai. A standard poll that forced a single response would show a tie between Chinese and Italian, with Thai in third, leaving you as hungry as when you started. On the other hand, a ranking poll would show Thai as the top choice, i.e. the least undesirable option. Spring rolls, anyone?

Now, the only problem with my suggestion was that while I knew I’d encountered a web-based survey tool like this a couple of years ago while visiting MIT Media Lab, I couldn’t remember what it was called or where to find it. And a quick check of other survey-building tools I’d successfully used before didn’t unearth similar functionality, so I was momentarily stuck.

No problem! A quick query to my professional online network on LinkedIn pointed me to that MIT tool within a few hours. Called Selectricity, it was created by MIT Media Lab‘s Computing Culture group as a Knight Foundation-funded Future of Civic Media project. Selectricity has a very easy-to-use “QuickVotes” function that allows you to create polls with amazing speed, and with a nifty sorting tool that has users dragging their preferences around the list before submitting their vote.

But the even nicer thing about my LinkedIn pals is that they also pointed me to a slew of other preferential polling tools and techniques. I haven’t been able to check these all out, but would love to hear about it if you do. Here’s what they suggested:

• Lots of folks pointed out that Google Forms can be used to record responses on a 1-5 scale (Thanks Len De Groot of the Knight Digital Media Center at Berkeley J School, Mathilde Piard of the Palm Beach Post, Dorian Benkoil of Teeming Media, Sree Sreenivasan of Columbia J School and Sandeep Junnarkar of CUNY J School)
• SurveyMonkey offers ranking functionality, emailed Joseph Maser, a senior business analyst and process engineer consultant at Autodesk, who says he’s used it and that it works great (although it may be a feature only available to paid accounts).
• Surveygizmo does allow respondents to rank choices, says former colleague TereLyn Hepple, a web content developer and technical writer at ECi Software Solutions. And it can be free depending on your response rates. Plus, she added, Micropoll does ranking by entering numerals and it’s free too.
• Cvent’s web surveys can do ranking as well, according to Sherrie Mersdorf, a database marketing analyst there. Cvent has a “Rank Order” survey, a vertical list of categories with a numeric text box next to each that respondents rank in numerical order

So a big thank you to all those folks that pointed me to Selectricity (Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.com, Jose Zamora of Knight Foundation, Jody Brannon of News21, Michele McLellan and Chrys Wu), and to the other folks who offered suggestions and responses (Rob Duncan of Biritah Columbia Institute of Technology, Paul Grabowicz of UC Berkeley J School, Joe Filippazzo of CUNY J  School and producer/programmer Wallace Jackson).

If you know of other survey tools, by all means suggest them below. We’ll be adding a page with links on our J School wiki page, which can be updated anytime, and will post it here when it’s live.