Qualtrics vs Springshare
Leslie Christianson
Duesterhoeft, Diane
Professor & Reference and Instruction Librarian
Louis J. Blume Library, Room 201
ST. MARY’S UNIVERSITY
The Catholic and Marianist University
A Laudato Si’ University
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Subject: [External] [ARL-ASSESS] Qualtrics vs Springshare
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Kat King
We did a project here at Princeton two years ago to build a new system for collecting information services data, and decided to move from SpringShare to Airtable, though we considered Qualtics as an option during the project. Below is a summary of why decided on Airtable.
The goals of the project were:
Collect accurate data for external reporting
Reduce burden of data collection for the 75+ people who need to record it
Create useful data sets for internal assessment and decision making
For individuals about the services they provide
For managers about their team’s services
For coordinating services across departments
For communicating library impact and value
We found that the lack of form logic and formatting control in LibInsights made it hard to collect data rich enough to be useful internally without making the form difficult to fill out accurately. Additionally, people said it was difficult to get the data back out of LibInsights to see statistics about their own or their department's work, so several people were using custom spreadsheets, in addition to or instead of using the central form.
When comparing options for how to improve this we chose Airtable over Qualtrics because it was easier to manage the data sharing half of our goals. Our campus’ Qualtrics isn’t set up with SSO integration for respondents (so I can’t require log-in or pull respondent email), so it was going to be clunky to implement any automated process for individuals and departments to view their own data.
The advantages of Airtable for us were:
1. Good form logic and formatting options
2. The ability to make dashboards with useful views of the data for individuals, departments and leadership
The Airtable Interfaces module allows me to set up dashboards and lists of records that automatically update as people enter data. They can be set to display just the data of the user viewing it, so service providers can see their own summary statistics and download their own full data to analyze elsewhere if they wish. I also made views that show library-wide totals and meaningful slices of data (e.g. how many patron interactions each month in support of a SR thesis?). I've also found it easy to do a custom query for things like this when asked by leadership, without having to export the data elsewhere.
The base is set-up so that most service providers only need a free account. The trade off is that they cannot update or delete their own records; we have a second form to request deletion of an incorrect record, and that’s not been much extra work so far. Managing the accounts (helping new people make an account and giving that account access) does take a little work, so make sure you plan for that to be someone’s responsibility.
3. Data syncing and integration with other data sets
The data syncing means that it’s easy to pull data from one Airtable base to another. For example, our staff directory is maintained in Airtable, and I use that to automatically pull the department of service providers so I can create views for managers of data about the services their department provides without extra work.
I also use this functionality to support custom forms when we just need a few fields to be the same across locations. For example, the service desks each have their own form for collecting desk stats, and these make a synced dataset of just the interactions that count as reference for external reporting so they each can track whatever types of interactions are meaningful for them, but we don’t have to filter each of them every year to get reference stats.
4. Automations
Automations allow for email reminders to service providers, importing data from APIs, and some data clean-up tasks.
5. Easy to leave
While the dashboard views, automations, and syncing are Airtable features, we can download any dataset as a CSV at any time, so we can move away from Airtable in the future if we need to.
Based on the success of this move, we’ve started putting more of our manually collected data into Airtable because of the easy entry forms, the ability to make interfaces with custom views that stay up-to-date, and the ability to create synced sub-sets of data.
Happy to answer any questions people have about setting up something like this in Airtable.
-Kat
Kat King (She/Her)
Assessment and User Experience Researcher
Princeton University Library