I am writing a grant proposal to the federal department of education asking for a big chunk o’ change to provide graduate history education to teachers in my state. But I need to prove in my proposal that a substantial number of teachers do in fact want graduate history courses. And I need to do this in two weeks.

I have access to the email addresses of several hundred history teachers. But these people are insanely overworked. If I ask them to print something off and snail mail it to me, or even to type out a bunch of answers, most will hit the delete button and go back to grading papers.

I need to create an HTML point-and-click form with 10-15 questions. How do I do this? I went through the options on my Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts and didn’t see anything. And a Google search just brings down a swarm of commercial sites. Please hope me!

Oh--I'm on XP boxes and do have Frontpage (don't hate me!)

HTML forms work by sending the data to a server, a computer that (usually) is the one that served the HTML page originally.

It doesn't work by sending back email. It's possible to come up with a hack that might send email, using javascript -- but any prudent person turns off javascript in email, as that's a major virus vector.

So do this: send them a link to a form on a server you control. In truth, you don't even need to run a program on the server to marshall the results, as the results will be in the query string (so long as your form uses a GET rather than a POST). You will need to be able to see your raw HTML logs for this to work, however.

Ask the webmaster for your organization, or if you're doing this all on your own, spring for $50 to set up a domain with a year's worth of hosting.

Then find an HTML page that does something similar to what you want, save the source, change the form url to your domain, and change the questions to your questions.

If you want, I could do all this for you on my web site and provide you with aggregated answers, for a small fee (I'd do it for free, but inevitably this sort of thing becomes a pain in the ass.)

Larry, I'd get ortho to do that, if you can... You're not really going to be able to do what you want (if I understand correctly) effectively via email... And the trouble it would save you if he did it as he suggests is significant.

There's probably some companies that will host a survey on their server for a fee, including that they will create the survey form themselves and send the answers back to you in an easy to read report. This will cost more, obviously. Unfortunately I do not know who they are so I cannot tell you where to look.

Hm, a fill-in PDF would work for that. You can get academic discounts for the full version of Acrobat, and somebody on campus or in your professional circle might already have that.

Are you sure that a simple web poll wouldn't work for the purposes of demonstrating interest? There are plenty of places you can do that. Or do you need more accountability?

And I'm pretty sure there are poll plug-ins for Movable Type and Wordpress, if not other reasonably-easy-to-install blog/CMS packages like Drupal.

If you are budget-strapped, I've used Survey Monkey, which is easy, and the basic service is free, but has some limitations.

A basic subscription is totally free and includes all of the basic features of SurveyMonkey. It's a great option for individuals, students, and anyone who doesn't need the advanced features of SurveyMonkey. Unlike other services, there are no annoying banner ads on your surveys. In addition, all of your survey responses remain absolutely private. Please note that basic subscribers are limited to a total of 10 questions and 100 responses per survey.

Thanks for all the advice. If I can't do it with email except as a link to an internet site, I think I can handle that. I'll make up for a lower response rate by sending it more teachers, and in the proposal narrative I'll write "Of the xx teachers who responded, 75% rated this as the best idea since sliced bread..." And thanks for the link to Survey Monkey, Madam. The proof of need section is just one part of a huge proposal, and the proposal raters are all historians like me, so anything that looks like objective data will fill the bill.

And if I can't work it out--watch your email, Ortho, we may do business!

That monkey thing should like the best bet. But if you do need to get in touch with me, feel free. (But note the address in my profile no longer works.)