Thanks to everyone who has given comments so far! Some answers to what's come up--
1) I've used the free version of Zoomerang (
www.zoomerang.com
) for a number of years now, although this particular survey was the most complicated one so far. They have a version you can pay for, but it's something like $399 a year--way over what I can spend. The surveys are exceptionally easy to set up--once I had the questions figured out that I wanted to ask, this one probably only took me half an hour or so. You can start from scratch, or they have a number of templates you can use.
2) I'm the only one who gets the results. If I want anyone else to see them, I have to distribute them. The bad thing about the free Zoomerang is that while it compiles the results for you, and it's easy enough to print the screens out, you can't export them to a Word or Excel document (although I'm fiddling with some cutting and pasting to see if I can get something decent to work out that way). Also, you can only view the results for the first 10 days the survey is open. At the end of 10 days, I think you can pay $50 to look at the results for an extended period of time. So, you really need to pay attention to when your 10 days ends.
3) My volunteer database has about 200 families on it, only 8 of whom don't have email. In the perfect world, I would get paper copies out to at least those 8 people, preferably even the whole school. But, as my children are quick to remind me, I'm not perfect! This is the first time I do something like this, and I wanted to just try it out and see if I got any worthwhile feedback first. If some real problems come to light, maybe I will expand it at some point. But I don't have the time or energy to deal with all the paper and hand compilation at this point.
4) There are a couple of ways of distributing the survey. One is to do what I did here, which was to post the survey URL somewhere. That eliminates the need for you to send the email addresses to Zoomerang, although they have a good privacy policy. The other way is to set up an address book, and send them out through the address book. The advantage of using the address book is that it will send reminders to people if they don't complete the survey.
5) You can also set it up so that a computer can only respond to the survey one time, if you want--prevents "ballot stuffing." I did set this one up for one time voting, but, in hindsight, I shouldn't have done that so that you could go back and look at it again if you wanted to. You can allow unlimited voting--good if you were going to set up a station at your school's open house, for example, to get opinions on something.