Google Forms Alternative: Makerble Vs. Google Forms

Google Forms is part of Google suit which lets you create forms online

Case Management

  • Google Forms is not a case management tool.

  • This means that in order to use Google Forms, you have to maintain a separate system to manage your day to day work with clients, beneficiaries and stakeholders

  • If you want to use surveys to understand your impact, you will have to copy & paste some data between your spreadsheet and Google Forms.

  • This is inefficient, takes up precious time and is susceptible to human error.

Distance Travelled

  • Google Forms is designed to give you a show you the results from a single survey campaign. It is not designed to compare individual people’s survey results over time.

  • On Makerble, every respondent has a profile

  • This means that Makerble can automatically detect their pre-programme, mid-programme and post-programme responses to each question and instantly report the improvement over time for each individual beneficiary but also for the cohort as a whole


There are no insights beyond the questions in your survey

  • Google Forms only looks at the answers to survey questions

  • It does not take into account the operational information you have about your beneficiaries

  • Because you cannot cross-reference your survey data with your operational data, it means that you miss out on valuable insights.

Example

  • If you are a therapy nonprofit, your case management system shows the demographic makeup of your clients and the number of sessions they attend. By cross-referencing this with your client’s survey results (which you can do in Makerble), you could see that:

    • people who attend between 5 & 10 sessions tend to be those that see the biggest improvement

    • Black girls aged from 14 to 17 tend to underperform versus the average

    • Everyone who is counselled by Therapist X tends to see a bigger change over time


Those kinds of insights that tell you about the audiences you're under-serving are only possible when you're able to cross-reference survey responses with operational data about how often you see people, who sees them, demographic details about those people, who referred them, etc.

Conclusion

  • Whilst Google Forms is a powerful surveys tool, it stops at surveys.

  • Whereas on Makerble you will get the context that helps you understand your survey results