Editor’s note: Margaret R. Roller is president of Roller Marketing Research, Gloucester, Va. Linelle M. Blais is national vice president, voluntarism, talent strategy, with the American Cancer Society, Atlanta.

With over three million volunteers, the American Cancer Society (ACS) is the largest cancer-related nonprofit community-based voluntary health organization in the U.S. In 1998 ACS embarked on a research program with its volunteers that went beyond any known published research within or outside the organization in terms of scope and depth. The centerpiece of our research - which was conducted every year through 2006 - was the Volunteer Satisfaction Study (VSS). The principal objectives of this study were to provide: an in-depth, detailed measure of volunteer satisfaction at the community level; actionable results for the ACS divisions as well as the national home office; and, a mechanism by which ACS could track or monitor volunteer satisfaction over time.

When considering design modes in 1998, a mail survey using the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) was deemed preferable to either telephone or face-to-face due to the nature and length of the questions as well as cost. For this reason the basic research design for the VSS consisted of a self-administered mail survey conducted among a random selection of “active” ACS community-level volunteers.

However, as Web surveys became increasingly popular among survey researchers, research work within ACS began to shift to this electronic mode, with staff increasingly conducting their own surveys via Web-based tools such as Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey. And, not surprisingly, we witnessed a rising demand for a Web version of the VSS.

Beyond the sheer novelty of online research (it seemed easy, new and everyone was doing it), the staff perceived real advantages to an online solution, including the ease of administration (no mailings), cost savings (no print...