New feature: create custom “friendly” survey links

We’re excited to bring you our latest hot feature: the “friendly survey link.” The power is now in your hands; you have the ability to name your survey’s URL. No more seemingly random numbers must indicate which survey is yours. Instead, survey links can take the form of your company name (what we call your subdomain), followed by your survey name, followed by sgizmo.com. For example, you might name your survey acmecompany.customerservice.sgizmo.com (assuming you were with Acme Company, of course!) This feature is available to all accounts, and Enterprise accounts can use up to five different company names when creating survey links.

To use the friendly survey link feature, click the Publishing > Promote tab of a survey and scroll down to the section on promoting by Web or Email. Your company name has already been filled in for you, and when you begin typing the survey name, you’ll get real-time feedback about the validity of the survey name (that is, whether it has been used already). Also, your old survey links are still valid, but you can go back to an existing survey and add this feature if you choose.

New online survey reporting tools!

You asked for enhanced reporting tools — and we’ve responded. Last week we launched an entirely new reporting platform. Now you can save multiple reports in different ways, display data in eye-catching new graphs, and run reports while simultaneously working on a survey in SurveyGizmo.

Think we’re kidding about the eye-catching charts? Check this out:

If you have any questions about how the reporting tools work, please take a look at our new tutorials on:

• Creating a basic report
• Exporting data
• Clearing responses

Stay tuned: Next week we plan to launch expanded filtering and graphic configuration reporting tools. The new platform gives us the ability to more easily roll new features into reporting, and you’ll be seeing these features over the next few months. Do you have a particular type of report you’d like to see? Please add a comment to this blog post or email us at support@sgizmo.com.

SurveyGizmo named one of best new web tools around

Friday we got a call asking for our logo. When we asked why, we learned that PROFIT Magazine, a publication covering business and technology, will be naming SurveyGizmo one of the best new web tools available. We haven’t seen the article yet, but we’ll let you know more when we know more!

New copy editor and documentation expert joins SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo is growing, and we’d like to introduce you to our newest member: copywriter Heidi Anderson. Heidi has been covering technology for publications such as ClickZ, MarketingSherpa, SoftwareCEO and Smart Computing magazine for more than a decade, and she prides herself on translating from geek speak to plain English. Her first task will be to seek out and destroy any nasty typos lurking our site, and you can soon expect to see a slew of additional tutorials, case studies and other useful info on our site. A recent customer said it looked like we might have a non-native English speaker writing for the website. I explained that as programmers, English is sometimes like a second language to us!

We’re thrilled to have her as part of the SurveyGizmo team. If you want to drop her a line, whether it’s to suggest a tutorial or to chat about her Peace Corps experiences in Nepal, please do. You can reach her at heidi@sgizmo.com.

Announcing SurveyGizmo API Access

We’re excited to announce the availability of the SurveyGizmo API (version 1.9). It lets you write applications that dynamically interact with your surveys, campaigns and reporting!

The API is available to all customers and plans — from free to enterprise accounts. When you create a new plugin, it becomes available to SurveyGizmo users from our account admin page. Users enable it for their accounts by clicking on the account link and then checking the ‘Activate’ button in the API section. We have already created an Apple Widget and a WordPress Plugin to get you started!

Developers who want to use the API to create: To get started, please read our API document, which outlines all the current calls and has instructions for getting a developer key (free).
Your can download our current API documentation here: SurveyGizmoAPI-V09.doc

We’re very excited to see what you can do with the API. This is just the beginning. We’ll continue to improve the API and open up more features in the next few months. If you come up with a great plugin, application, use or whatnot — let us know — we may blog about it and give you some well-deserved kudos!

Thanks again for everyone’s feedback and patience so far. We know there are still areas for improvement and we are cranking through them one at a time. Some days when we close our eyes we can even see the light at the end of the tunnel — granted, it may just be the glow from our monitors imprinted on our retina.