Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about Zoomerang, so I have no opinions either way on that service. I chose SurveyMonkey after getting a glowing recommendation from someone I know at an HR consulting firm which conducts frequent surveys, both large-scale and small.
I’ve been happy with the service, especially at the price. I’m a university-based social science researcher, and I’ve used SurveyMonkey to conduct three large-scale projects with as many as 1,700 participants and with pretty extensive surveys (100+ items). However, it’s been about a year since I finished the last project, so I may be a little rusty on details.
PROS
*Cheap, cheap, cheap at $19.95 per month for a professional monthly membership, especially considering that with online surveys, there are also no data entry costs.
*For that price, you can collect up to 1,000 responses per month. Even if you go over 1,000, they just charge a nickel per response over that.
*It’s pretty easy to figure out how to set up your survey, there are a lot of question types, and it’s easy to set up skip patterns with conditional logic (e.g., if respondent answers “no” to this question, skip the next 3 items).
*The site’s Help Center has pretty extensive and detailed FAQs, and for anything that’s not covered, I found customer service to be quite responsive and helpful.
*If you need to conduct any complex analyses, you can download the data as an Excel or comma delimited file, which can be read by most statistical packages (e.g., SPSS, which is what I use).
*You can keep an eye on the data as it comes in, so if responses start to drop off, you can send out reminders and exhortations. You can even see the responses, which is nice for people like me who are antsy to see even preliminary results.
CONS
*This isn’t that big a deal, but there’s something about the name “SurveyMonkey” that just sounds risible and unprofessional to me, and the name will show in the address bar when respondents follow the link to your survey. At this point, though, SurveyMonkey is so commonly used that the name may not even faze people anymore.
*If respondents are using shared computers, they need to complete the survey in one sitting (not ideal for surveys as long as ours) or else anyone else who uses the same computer can see (and overwrite) their responses. This was a problem for us because we were collecting confidential data, and most respondents were using their work computers to fill out the survey (they were recruited through their workplaces). Some employees only had access to shared computers or kiosks. We had to create two versions of the survey, one for people using private computers (who were allowed to save partially completed surveys) and one for people using shared computers (who had to finish in one sitting). This may or may not be applicable to you depending on the length of your survey and on whether multiple respondents will use the same computer.
I will subscribe to this thread, so feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.