Google Forms alternatives: Makerble vs. Google Forms

For quick one-off data capture forms, Google Forms is great. But when you need to connect form submissions with the rest of your process, for example adding new referrals to your database or linking survey responses to respondents, Google Forms quickly begins to fall down.

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

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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.