How to Create a Survey or Poll for your Blog using Google Drive
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Nifty guide on how to create a survey or poll for your blog
A couple of days ago, I wanted to add a poll to one of my blog posts. Since the Empower Network blog does not include survey or poll plugins, I searched online for an alternative.
I found some that required you to sign up for a “free” account, which I did not want to do, and then I found a few that let you create the poll form online, then paste the code to your page.
Well, those didn’t work. The only two I could get to actually work on my blog post would break as soon as I hit “publish.” So what was I to do?
Refusing to give up, I finally found this article by Jason Morrison on how to create a survey or poll for your blog using Google Drive. (The article is about Google Docs, which has been replaced by Google Drive).
Even though some of the menus have changed, the guide is straight forward and easy to follow. Not only did it work for me, but the poll looks much better and has a lot of nifty features for data capture and such.
I have included this guide, unedited, for the benefit of other Empower Network members who might also be looking to add a survey or poll to their blog!
Enjoy.
Here is Jason Morrison’s guide…
You may have noticed the snazzy poll I posted on my blog the other day. There’s a number of different survey and poll plugins for WordPress but all the ones I’ve looked at have caveats and limitations. You can also use a service like SurveyMonkey but it has some data limitations for free accounts. Instead, I used Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create a survey quickly and easily. Here’s how to do it.
1. Getting to Google Docs and starting your form
We’re going to assume you have a Gmail account or have signed up for some other Google service already. Go to . Click on New -> Form
2. Creating your form
This is actually pretty easy, and the online help does a pretty good job explaining what to do. You have a number of options when creating a question – you can make it multiple choice, full text, or even a numerical scale, and you can mark some questions as required. If you’re looking for the “Add question” button, it’s up at the top of the page rather than below the last question.
3. Publishing the survey on your site
After you’ve created your form, use the More Actions button to find the Embed option. Just copy this iframe into your blog post – it’s that simple. You’ll get code that looks something like this:
<iframe src=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=ppevxmL24UqnRb77Xy3AOWg” width=”310″ height=”1044″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″>Loading…</iframe>
You can change the height and weight to better fit your blog template. Keep in mind that some blogging software will not let you post HTML code and others, like WordPress, require you to use the HTML view.
If you can edit your template or sidebar you can even include the poll on every page, instead of just putting it in a post.
4. Getting data
Here’s where it gets really cool – the data is automatically collected into a spreadsheet that you can share, edit online, or export to Microsoft Excel. It’s pretty easy to export CSV for a statistical package like SPSS too.
There’s an optional fifth step, creating a chart or graph to let your users see the results, that I’ll cover later. If you can’t wait just jump back to my post about urban usability and read about how I created the time-series chart there.
What next?
Thank you for taking the time to read through this guide.
If you enjoyed this guide or found it useful, please share it with your friends and team! I’m sure they’ll love you for it.
TEAM TAKE MASSIVE ACTION
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