Altouthg there are many tools on the market for conducting surveys, more and more teams choose to run their polls and surveys directly in Slack, because it’s fast, easy, and often less expensive than signing up for a standalone survey tool.
In this article, we’ll review the best Slack survey apps you can find on the market right now and explore how much you can do even on their free plans.
Tune in!
Probably the best way to describe a slack survey app is to create a survey with it.
So, let’s launch Geekbot Surveys and create a demo survey with it.
The first thing you see after launching Geekbot is its console, or dashboard. To start a survey, we need to select the “My Polls and Surveys” in the left menu, then select “Surveys (multiple questions)”.
Tip: you can also start a quick survey by sending “geekpoll” to the bot
As you can see, Geekbot features a vast library of templates that can be used as a beeline for creating different types of surveys. Here we can find employee NPS surveys, team feedback surveys, pulse surveys, 360s, and many more.
We can build our own survey from scratch. Let’s do that by clicking the “Build your own” button in the upper right.
To create a custom survey, we will need to choose survey questions, participants, schedule, and visibility. Geekbot divided these steps into four tabs to speed up things and make the process of creating your survey as intuitive as possible.
Step 1. Questions
Let’s start with survey questions. You can create a one-question survey, or add as many questions as you want (although we recommend keeping your surveys, especially recurring, shorter to keep participants engaged).
As you can see, you not only control the number of questions, but also the appropriate type of responses for each. For example, for a “On a scale for 0 to 10” questions you’d want participants to keep their responses numeric. This also helps with visualization of survey results later – Geekbot will automatically turn gathered data into visual graphs!
Step 2. Choose Survey Audience
This tab controls who will see your survey in Slack. You can either handpick participants by their @username or broadcast your survey to an entire Slack channel. In the latter scenario, anyone who has access to this channel will be able to take part in your survey.
Here you can also modify the survey’s intro message, adding some relevant data or maybe a perky icebreaker!
3. Pick Your Schedule
This tab helps you control when your survey will start. You can start it immediately after the set up, or schedule a delayed start later in the day or next month and anything in between.
Here you can also make your survey recurring. Let’s say you want to gather data on team well-being every 2 weeks. Simply choose appropriate recurrence and Geekbot will be running your surveys on time every time until you tell it to stop.
You can also specify the duration of your survey, accepting responses only for X hours after it was published.
4. Control Results Visibility
In the “Results” tab, you can control the visibility of survey results: you can make them either visible to everyone at once, or visible to participants only after they voted, or visible exclusively to survey creators in the dashboard.
Additionally, you can anonymise survey results to boost sincerity on more sensitive topics.
How Your Team Takes the Survey
Once you’ve filled out all of the appropriate fields, you can schedule when you want your Slack survey to go out. When it’s time, participants get a DM from Geekbot asking them to take the survey.
When you get your survey results, you can view them either directly in your Geekbot dashboard or via Slack:
If you view them from your dashboard, you get additional insights such as participation rate (i.e. 14 out of 19 people filled out their survey today) and how many people on your team make a habit of filling out every report (i.e. Kate Martinez has completed 1248 consecutive surveys, followed by Brandon Clark with 748, and so on).
Advantages of Geekbot Surveys:
- Free with unlimited surveys for teams of up to 10 members
- Dozens of pre-made templates for every survey type there is
- Real-time analytics graphs
- Advanced visualization of survey results even on a free plan
What we discussed above is what makes Geekbot a natural choice for creating and sending out surveys in Slack.
It’s quick and easy but can also grow and adapt to your team and its needs. It’s perfect for a quick survey where you want to see if the team wants pizza or sandwiches for Friday lunch, but you can also use it to figure out operational inefficiencies or where your team members are most frustrated with their job.
Further, these features are also great for holding different meetings, not just surveys.
Our customers use Geekbot for a variety of reasons, including:
Geekbot Surveys is completely free for teams of 10 or fewer. For larger teams, you can either pay monthly ($1 per user month) or annually ($0.75 per user per month).
We’re dedicated to transparent and fair pricing, which means you only ever pay for the number of users who actively use Geekbot in a given month, not how many employees have signed up.
Learn more and sign up here, or keep reading below for some alternatives.
2. DailyBot
Although most of its templates are for project management meetings, DailyBot can be used for running slack surveys as well.
The most appropriate is a Pulse Survey template, which contains 10 questions for gathering general feedback from your employees.
We still recommend cutting the number of questions in half, at least, or experimenting with different survey formats. With Dailybot you’ll have to edit or create such surveys from scratch.
DailyBot Features:
- Pulse survey template
- 1 Slack workspace on a free plan
- Daily standups
- No advanced visualization on free plans
3. Polly
Polly is a survey Slack app that also has a built-in survey capability.
You can launch surveys directly in your team messenger and control cadence, participants, and questions. However, almost all survey functionality is locked behind a paid plan (starting with $12 per month).
Features:
- 45-day survey results history limit of free plan
- Scheduling and exports on paid plans
4. Survey Sparrow
SurveySparrow is an extensive survey platform with Slack integration capabilities.
With the suitable plugin, you can customize survey questions and settings according to your needs. Team members can complete the survey directly in Slack, and you’ll receive responses in real-time.
SurveySparrow features:
- Publish surveys in Slack
- A wide variety of pricing options for large teams
- Ticketing, Brand, Research surveys modules if your survey needs go beyond team
5. Deel
Deel is another tool that can help you run surveys in Slack. You can use the built-in Engagement and Company Confidence template to launch quick surveys, and schedule them according to your needs.
Unfortunately, Deel surveys are only available to corporate teams that are already using an extensive network of Deel apps, hence why the price will not be suitable for one-off surveys.
Deel surveys are suitable for enterprise-size teams who already use Deel products in their workflow.
Next Steps: Creating Your Free Survey in Slack with Geekbot
Using Geekbot to run surveys in Slack gives you the best of both worlds. Your surveys can be very simple and straight to the point. You can ask your team what type of pizza they want, and give them the choices of ham & pineapple, vegetable, or meat lovers. You can get that survey up and out in a matter of minutes and collect responses from everyone in the channel.
You can also use Geekbot’s advanced functionality to create more involved surveys — surveys that require your team to think out a longer, more nuanced response and surveys with various question types. You can set up recurring surveys and get them sent out to all of your remote workers based on their timezone.
Again, these features are free for teams of 10 or fewer. For larger teams, we offer monthly ($1 per user per month) or annual ($0.75 per user per month) pricing. But we only ever charge you based on how many users actively participated in a survey in a given month.
If you’re ready to get started, click here.
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Frequently asked questions
Can You Do a Survey in Slack?
Sometimes teams just want to do a simple survey in Slack without adding an app to their Slack workspace — is that possible?
Yes, but it’s limited. There’s only one way to do a survey in Slack, and it looks like this:
You create messages with different options. For example, let’s say you want to know which day next week is the best day for the office party.
You would write the question: “Which day next week is the best for the office party?” Then you’d write the possible answers: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Next to each answer would be a different emoji (a popular method is different colors of the heart emoji). Your team will use emoji reactions to show their vote.
If you want more functionality, then you need to look at the Slack app directory for a list of possible survey apps, like Geekbot.
