Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wonder what my congregation thinks about (fill in the blank)” or “I wish I could ask my youth group if they preferred (option one) or (option 2)”? Well now that a majority of people use smartphones, you can!

I might be strange (that’s an understatement), but I really enjoy surveys. I like to see how people feel about certain topics and understand what things people agree or disagree on. There are quite a few web applications that allow you to conduct live polling, but many of them come with a pretty large price tag. However, there are some free options that work really well. One of the free polling web applications that I’ve used and really like is Murvey. 

What Is Murvey?

Murvey is an online tool that allows you to type in multiple questions and also provide a variety of answer types, such as multiple choice, drop down, or a blank text box. 

Sharing Your Survey

Murvey allows you to embed the survey into your church’s website either directly into your page or as a pop-up. That way, you can direct your members to go to your church website and take the survey, rather than trying to direct them all to an external link.

Checking Your Results

Once your respondents fill out and submit the survey, they can view the current results of the survey. You, as the moderator, get a lot of cool results feedback. You can view the results in the app or even download them into an Excel version.

This app makes it very easy to quickly throw together and send out a survey for your congregation so that you can get a grasp on how your members feel about certain topics. 

Things to Keep in Mind

As Ann shared in her post on surveys, it’s important to be intentional about how you word your survey. If you want to get good results, you need to be sure that you don’t word your survey in a way that forces certain answers, rather than the respondents’ true feelings.

This may seem obvious, but once you have the survey results, it’s important to sit down with your church leadership and talk through how the results change or reinforce your planning. If your congregation feels strongly one way or another, use that information to shape the direction of your ministry.