SurveyCTO

Survey CTO is a data collecting software as a service which offers computer assisted personal interview technology. There is a free account available to try without a credit card required, so you can give it a shot before committing which is good. The platform is intuitive to learn and start using quickly. I was able to successfully download a template and upload it into the form designer within about fifteen minutes. There is good documentation and support available to help you learn what you need to know. I have not had a reason to be in touch with their team yet but by all accounts when doing my research it is excellent which is good to know. The platform is quite a hands on platform and allows you to customize your surveys in quite advanced ways to help you collect data efficiently once setup. Compared to doing things the manual way using paper and pen this is going to increase your productivity great and minimize human error and delay significantly as well. The flexibility of this platform is the strongest feature in my opinion. You can utilize ODK tools as well as a lot of native configuration elements as well. The ability to customize your app completely is great. You certainly have a lot of control without having to develop software and infrastructure from scratch. The real time monitoring is another solid feature along with the complexity you can build into a simple end user form for a variety of purposes from impact evaluation to field work and academic research. The audio monitoring is a particularly strong feature which allows you to listen in live, which is interesting and powerful in certain instances. Security is also very advanced and is one of the main selling points for using Survey CTO in my opinion. They utilize IRB compliance which is very sophisticated and should appease and board or management who need to approve your data collection process. The complexity of your custom application is completely up to you and there is no coding required but there is a time investment required to setup surveys which are tiered or include conditional logic and multiple variations in terms of choices and possible responses, yet it`s great to have the flexibility to do so with a free trial available to get this setup before going live.

There isn`t a native iOS app available by my search in the Apple app store which is unfortunate. I don`t understand why you wouldn`t at least place `coming soon` in the features if it is in the pipeline. I believe this is going to be a deal breaker for some as there are plenty of us with iPhones and iPads who would use Survey CTO perhaps, if so. There doesn`t seem to be as advanced roles and permissions as there could be in that there is not a role available for someone to have access to downloading and data but not form management, but there are other combinations of these three available.

This is not the simplest survey software in the market compared to SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo which have pre-made templates for you to drop in and customize within seconds of entering you account, though it delivers the most specialized and flexible purpose for computer assisted personal interviews to do with impact evaluation, monitoring and evaluation, academic research and field research.