Press Release: Beaches Habitat and SurveyGizmo Team Up to Pre-Qualify Homeowners

How can a housing assistance nonprofit qualify and serve more clients without wasting the time and raising false hopes of those who don’t qualify?

The answer is clear to Beaches Habitat, explains Deborah Testa, website coordinator. We have many applications in which we can use SurveyGizmo’s user-friendly website tools to create our own surveys and questionnaires. However, what prompted us to partner with SurveyGizmo was the fact that we were seeking to create a means in which prospective homeowners can fill out a simple questionnaire over the world wide web that will allow them to determine if they qualify to apply (on a preliminary basis) to purchase a Beaches Habitat home. We heard that SurveyGizmo was user friendly, and one of the best web-based survey tools on the market.

Susie Miller, a member of Beaches Habitat’s affiliate’s Family Services Committee explains further—“I have been conducting informational meetings for prospective Beaches Habitat homeowners for the past five years. I’ve noticed that many people come to the meetings only to find out that they do not qualify to apply to purchase a Beaches Habitat home. For instance, they may not live within our service area, and this disqualifies them from applying. I always feel bad, as most of our prospective homeowners work and have young children, and attending a meeting to determine that they do not qualify, is a waste of their time. We also recognize that there are prospective homeowners who never take the first step to attend an informational meeting—it can be intimidating and overwhelming. For years, I’ve been thinking that there must be another way to screen prospective homeowners. We are now working on refining the questions for prospective homeowners to complete.”

“We are excited about the potential of this questionnaire,” explains Debora. “After testing the questionnaire, and making any necessary changes to refine its use, we plan on introducing this tool to Habitat for Humanity affiliates across the country. This is the type of efficiency that is truly exciting as it relates to using the world wide web. Think of the thousands of hours that will be saved across the county by the creation of one simple web-based questionnaire. Our prospective homeowners will be able to fill it out in three to five minutes. If they do not qualify, they will know immediately—no false hopes or wasting time to attend a meeting. On the other hand, they will know more clearly if they qualify to purchase a Beaches Habitat home on preliminary basis, providing them with the confidence to attend our informational meeting. This is exciting!”

As for other uses for SurveyGizmo as it relates to Beaches Habitat, “I have many ideas,” says Deborah. Our affiliate builds homes, community and futures. We have volunteers who pledge 25,000 hours of their time yearly and a full after-school educational program for children of Beaches Habitat homeowners. There will be plenty of opportunities to put the tools available to us through SurveyGizmo to use!”

About Beaches Habitat

Beaches Habitat (www.beacheshabitat.org) was founded in 1992 by a small group of volunteers committed to eliminating substandard and overcrowded housing in the Jacksonville Beaches area. To date, they have completed more than 166 homes in the Beaches area. Beaches Habitat is multi faceted. Beaches Habitat builds new homes for families and provide education assistance to homeowners and their children.

About SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com) is an online survey and data collection plus analysis tool that helps users easily create online surveys, polls, questionnaires, web forms, quizzes and landing pages for marketing, research and customer service research. The company is known for its rich feature set and responsive customer service. SurveyGizmo is based in Boulder, Colorado, with an additional office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. SurveyGizmo is privately held.

SalesForce integration documentation

FYI, this is just a quick note to let you know we’ve added a new section about SalesForce integration to our tutorials.

We Made the Times!

Well, the GTD (Getting Things Done) Times, that is. Below is the video interview of Scott and I taken just after our Core Conversation at South by South West about GTD.

If you are not familiar with GTD we highly recommend you take a look into it (GTD Times is a good place to get started). SurveyGizmo’s a big advocate of GTD techniques internally — they help us build you better products!

SurveyGizmo’s New Digs & Open House

SurveyGizmo has grown up and left for a house of its own.

Have a look at SurveyGizmo’s new digs! We’ve been growing like crazy and it was time for some more square footage. When we found this stand alone office (a converted craftsman-style house) we knew it was perfect for us. We’ve have 4 times the room and more individual offices. The color even matches our logo!

While we have moved our offices nothing else changes from a client perspective. Our data centers still remain in San Antonio, Miami and Los Angeles, but if you do send correspondence please change the address to -

SurveyGizmo
2653 Spruce Street
Boulder, Colorado 80304

We’re in a great neighborhood, with lots of other tech companies nearby, a Kinkos next door, great food, easy parking, and our mountain views aren’t bad either. Here is one of our neighbors you might have heard of with Boulder’s Green Mountain in the background.All clients or other tech folks are invited to come by and have beer or challenge Derek to Guitar Hero.

Open House Party - Friday, April 4th

If you live in the Denver/Boulder area we’d be happy to have you drop by our Open House Party Friday, April 4th. If you’re an old friend come celebrate our expansion, and if you haven’t heard of us before, come by and we’ll give you a beer and short demo if you’d like. Please RSVP here.

View Larger Map

TECH Cocktail Boulder

Right before heading to Austin, we were fortunate enough to do a demo at TECH Cocktail Boulder. Here’s a nice writeup of the event, and below is some video. Our piece starts at about 2:49. I had a heck of a cold that night and was about to lose my voice.

SxSW: Returning with Renewed Vigor!

Scott, Derek and I went down to Austin this last week to attend the interactive portion of SxSW. For us, it’s a bit of an anniversary and a time to reflect on what we have done over the last year — as well one heck of a shindig.

This year was no exception. The highlights in no particular order:

• Scott and Derek’s panel on Getting Things Done was a huge success. I walked in, expecting to see a table of 12-15 people, and to my surprise the room was packed. 30 or 40 people people standing six deep to listen and participate with Derek and Scott. Very cool.
• Seeing Kevin Rose from Digg try to bribe his way into a restaurant ahead of us. (Sorry, Kevin. We tried that too and still had to wait an hour.)
• Catching up with Kathy Sierra and listening to her fantastic presentation about 20 ways to woo your users. (Expect some experience changes in our UI.)
• Shawn Henry from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative gave us some great tips on improving our accessibility — making SurveyGizmo not just “compliant in letter” but also in spirit.
• A large number of our customers attended (next year we’ll try to have a party) like Narissa from Big Fish Games, Andrew Hyde from Startup Weekend and Linux Journal and our friends from Wondermill. Interesting note: Narissa’s input last year resulted in one of our popular question types–the image chooser–so every one thank her! :)
• On the fun side: Everywhere we went Scott was mistaken for Quentin Tarantino (even with his name tag hanging from his neck, lol)

The most important benefit of this break is perhaps that it *is* a break and has reminded all of us to keep innovating and, most importantly, look at our interface from your perspective. These next few months we have decided to make things simpler, easier and add a sense of reward for using SurveyGizmo.

Thanks for everyone who has been patient as half our company attends the event. And thanks especially to the other half of the company who’s been stuck back at the office keeping everything running smoothly. We’ll all be back Thursday with renewed drive and fresh ideas!