Surveys are beneficial for a lot of things like data collection, research and customer response.  No doubt, you’ve had to fill a couple out or create them for clients and bosses.

Surveys can be a pain in the ass, frankly.  Aside from making them look good – they have to function correctly.  Oftentimes, the data is critical in nature, so security and ease of use is a must too.

I wanted to build a quick survey to give people after our Social Media Webinar on Thursday.  I cForms in Wordpress rocks, but I don’t want to be emailed the data.  I just want to download it once it’s all done.  Hosted options like SurveyGizmo are limiting as to what the free account gives you, and all that stuff is sitting on some one else’s server!

So I ventured out to find an open source solution.

After trolling around SourceForge for hours, I finally found LimeSurvey. 

LimeSurvey is a complete survey application that lets you do the install on your servers, build a really nice looking survey, and keep the results in a database. 

One of the beautiful things about LimeSurvey is its ease of use.  After only a couple minutes you can have something up and running.  There is also some graphing and reporting options available in the admin panel.

So the next time you need a survey done, check out LimeSurvey.  All you need to do is install it on your web server, populate the fields, and you’re off and running!

Let me know what you think about the app!

About the author: Jason Drohn is a social media strategist and web publisher who loves teaching people how to build successful businesses and blogs online. Follow him on Twitter to find out more!