This runs through some of the pros/cons of various survey platforms for the project I’m doing for St. Vincent’s. The platforms are listed below, with a final section discussing issues with getting surveys conducted outside of Apricot into the database, which is an issue common to many platforms.

Table of Contents

Paper surveys

Collecting information with a paper survey has some strong advantages, hence many of the forms (form B, emergency assistance) are currently done on paper. Clients can be given a form to fill out while they wait on other services and there’s a nice paper trail. However, there are plenty of drawbacks like manual data entry, difficultly reading handwriting, lack of conditional logic, and linking the forms back to Apricot at the end of the day.

Free
Flexible layouts
Easy to change
Doesn’t require staff/volunteer to complete

Data entry
Not intergrated to Apricot
No logic
No validation
Have to write clearly

Google Forms

Google Forms is a good, affordable digital option that has most of the core functionality you want with simple surveys. It allows you to skip questions, validate responses, and is free. It doesn’t take much technical knowledge to use (unlike more sophisticated options like RedCap or Qualtrics) and has a good variety of question types. It also reports to Google Sheets, which makes it easier to integrate with other systems

There are some drawbacks. Unlike RedCap, the layout can get quite long with long surveys and it doesn’t allow for complex logic¹. And like all of the other options here (besides direct entry into Apricot), we have the issue of lack of integration with Apricot. This is addressed in a seperate section.

Free
No technical skill needed to design/change surveys
Clients could fill it out themselves

Not intergrated to Apricot
Only basic branching logic
Not easy to navigate in long surveys

3rd party services

There are numerous 3rd party apps that could be considered, so I won’t go into them here. From my experience, most are pretty much the same as Google Forms, but with a little flexibility at the price of increased cost. For what it’s worth, I think Survey Monkey does do a better job collecting contact information than Google Forms.

Various additional features (based on specific platform)
Not intergrated to Apricot
Cost money

RedCap

RedCap is a software that UTMB has access to which I think is worth mentioning. It has advanced options that aren’t present in Google Forms, which can be tested here by adjusting the number of people in the household.

It’s a powerful software that I think is ideal for designing complex surveys, but probably isn’t the best choice here. For one, I don’t know if I’m allowed to use it outside of UTMB and even if I am it’s an external dependency that SVH may not want to be reliant on. It’s also fairly complex in the design of the surveys, so it takes more technical skills to make new questions or sections.

Advanced logic features
Can ‘pipe’ responses into questions later in survey
Supports API integration

Not intergrated to Apricot
Hosted through UTMB
More technical set up

Directly in Apricot

When it comes to assuring that information is correctly entered into Apricot, the most robust solution is to have everything entered directly into Apricot at the point of service. There’s some areas where this would be practically impossible to do (e.g. parts of the emergency assistance form), but generally speaking this is the best way to prevent duplicate records, assure information is up to date, and centralize the information.

The biggest advantage of recording information directly in Apricot is also its biggest disadvantage: Staff² must be talking directly with clients for the entire encounter and data entry process.

This means that it’ll likely use more of the staff’s time and slow down the processing of clients. But this also gives the opportunity to verify that key information is up to date (e.g. “Do you still live at 123 Market St?", “Is the best phone number still (409)-345-6789?") without having clients write it down needlessly.

Linking results to Apricot

This is a common issue to most any solution that we implement, but is going to be very important for accurate recording and documentation. Unless we are recording things in Apricot at the time of service, we need some way to match the information collected on the survey (or the food pantry list for that matter) to a record in Apricot. Currently, this is done by name alone which is problematic.

Let’s say Sara Garcia Rodriguez³ shows up to the food pantry, so I write down her name as Sara Garcia Rodriguez. Not being familiar with this naming convention, I might think Garcia is her middle name (when it’s actually half of her surname) and enter her as first name: Sara last name: Rodriguez in Apricot. The next time she shows up, someone smarter than me is working in the pantry and sees that we don’t have a Sara Garcia Rodriguez in the system and adds a record for her. We now have two records for the same person:

This isn’t just a problem with Hispanic names, because there’s also issues with misspelling & variations (was that Sara or Sarah?). And I haven’t done actual importing of records in to Apricot yet, but I’m almost 100% sure that it’s going to require exact matches in order to import survey results into the database programatically, which means the difference between Sara / Sarah, Glen / Glenn, Eric / Erik, or Rogers / Rodgers is going to matter.