This assessment compared to Google Forms
The short answer
You can absolutely run a board self-assessment in Google Forms, and if you already have questions you trust and a board that trusts you with the results, it will work. Three things break at scale: the administrator can see who answered, there is nothing to compare against, and next year the questions will have quietly changed.
Side by side
| This assessment | Google Forms | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free or low-cost |
| Anonymous by design | Yes | No. The administrator can see who answered. |
| Peer benchmarking | Yes, filtered by budget and focus area once enough organizations have taken part | None. Nothing to compare against. |
| Staff and community feedback | Optional, add anytime | Possible, but you would build and run that yourself |
| Year-over-year comparison | Yes. The wording never changes once published. | Only if you ask the exact same questions yourself |
| Time to report | Ready as soon as your survey closes, on your own timeline | As fast as you can tally the results yourself |
Pricing as published by Google Forms, checked August 2026. Benchmark filtering by budget and focus area unlocks once 30 similar organizations have taken part. Until then a report shows the raw numbers and says so plainly.
Choose Google Forms if
- You already have an instrument you trust and only need somewhere to put it.
- You want to ask something specific to this year that no standard instrument covers.
- Your board is small and high-trust enough that the anonymity question genuinely does not arise.
- You want total control of wording and are willing to give up comparability for it.
A form tool is more flexible than any fixed instrument, and flexibility is a real advantage when you have a question specific to your own situation. Nothing here stops you running both: a standard assessment for comparability and a short form of your own for whatever is particular to this year.
Choose this one if
- Anyone on the board might wonder whether the administrator can see their answers. In a form tool, the honest answer is usually yes.
- You want to know whether a score is normal for an organization like yours, which requires a cohort you do not have.
- You want the chief executive's answers reported separately rather than mixed in.
- You want next year's numbers to mean something next to this year's, which requires wording nobody edits.
Common questions
- Can Google Forms collect responses anonymously?
- It can be configured not to collect email addresses, which helps. It still records submission order and timestamps, and on a board of eight people that is often enough to work out who said what. Whether that matters depends on how much your board trusts the person holding the results.
- What about SurveyMonkey or Microsoft Forms?
- The same tradeoffs apply. They are general survey tools, and the gaps are not bugs in them. They were not built to hold a board's answers about its own chief executive.
- Can we just use your questions in our own form?
- Yes. Every question is published in full at /questions and you are welcome to them. You will not get the benchmarking or the separate chief executive column that way, but the questions themselves are not the part we are protective of.
Judge it yourself
Every question is published in full, so you can read the instrument before deciding anything. Setting one up is free and takes a few minutes.