Surprisingly, there are still a lot of people out there who use paper or hard copy surveys. Many departments in universities, businesses and organizations, non profits, and groups that need to conduct surveys or questionnaires distribute their questionnaires in paper form. This makes gathering the data extremely difficult because often the results have to be manually counted and inputted into a computer software or database system anyway. Also, a lot of times people lose or misplace the survey or just don't have the time to mail it in or the will to return the survey to the conductor.

Online Surveys and questionnaires offer many advantages to the traditional paper or hard copy survey. Online surveys can be accessed by anyone all over the world. You can customize, reuse them, and add such features as time constraints which are harder to do by paper form. But most of all the results are collected and analyzable right away. The results of online and web surveys go directly into your database with no need for manual counting.

We don't recommend online surveys for all situations, because in some cases there are people who do not have access to a computer or there are people who still prefer to take paper surveys. But in most cases especially at universities or businesses, an online survey application should be used or at least should be offered in conjunction with paper surveys.