Colorado entrepreneur Bill Flagg makes strategic investment in Web 2.0 survey company SurveyGizmo

May 5, 2008, Boulder, Colorado – SurveyGizmo, an online survey, data collection and analysis tool today announced a strategic investment in the company by Bill Flagg, president and former co-owner of RegOnline, the online event registration company. Proceeds from the investment will be used by SurveyGizmo to expand staffing to meet the demands of a growing customer base that includes Fortune 1000 companies, university researchers and major market research firms.

The company has exceeded 100% growth, quarter over quarter, for the past year, and is already profitable. The executive team sees the investment by Flagg as a strategic move that gives them access to some additional funds, but more importantly, a funding partner who understands how to grow subscription-based online services. “SurveyGizmo reminds me of the place in it’s industry and growth curve that RegOnline was just before we began to really explode,” says Flagg.

“SurveyGizmo has grown organically over the past 2 years, and we’re at a key point in our growth curve, ” says Scott McDaniel, CEO of SurveyGizmo. “Bill’s expertise in growing RegOnline 10x, primarily using web marketing strategies, fits with our market strategy going forward, so we’re excited to tap into that expertise.”

The investment from Flagg will help SurveyGizmo ramp up and hire quickly to fill key positions on every front — from sales and client services to marketing and application development.

About SurveyGizmo
SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com) is an online survey, 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. Customers include Apple, Business.com, CMP, TechTarget and UCLA. The company is known for its rich feature set and responsive customer service. SurveyGizmo is a privately held company based in Boulder, Colorado, with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About The Felix Fund
Bill Flagg formed The Felix Fund, LLC in March 2008 to make strategic investments in companies that have a remarkable product and customer base and is ready for explosive growth through organic marketing strategies. Flagg invests his energy and success strategies as much as the LLC’s funds. Learn more at www.BillFlagg.blogspot.com.

Customer innovations: Educators use online surveys for student tests and quizzes

Sure, we created this great online survey software, but we certainly didn’t have any idea of all the ways that our customers would use it. Customer suggestions about SurveyGizmo have been the seed of great new functions and features we’ve created. The same holds true for you — you can get great ideas for ways to use SurveyGizmo from our other customers. Today, I was speaking with Cheri, one of our fantastic support staff, and she told me about some interesting ways that educators use SurveyGizmo to conduct certifications, tests and quizzes. Here are some of the examples she shared with me this afternoon:

• one educator in Canada is using SurveyGizmo to quiz her students that are spread across the country. Depending on where students live — what province — some of their questions are different. So, all the students get the same questions up front, but she uses survey branching to deliver province-specific questions for students in each province. All the surveys are graded in the system automatically, and each student gets his or her tally and whether they passed or failed, sent to them right away.
• a workplace certification program conducts the online portion of their certification online, hosted on SurveyGizmo. Each student can take the test online. Once they finish the test, it is immediately graded in the system, and the student gets their results — how many questions they got right, how many they got wrong. If the student passes, SurveyGizmo automatically sends them a pdf of their certification. The program is set up to immediately notify both the student and the employer whether or not the student passed or failed.

What cool things have you been able to do accomplish using SurveyGizmo? Add your comments about it, or contact me to let me know, and perhaps your nifty survey innovation will help our other customers.

Online help improvements on SurveyGizmo

For the amount of help-related content we have on SurveyGizmo.com, we’ve been hearing from you now that it can be difficult to find the particular help you need to answer questions about how to make your online surveys smarter. So, as a first step to helping you find that content better, we’ve changed the internal search on SurveyGizmo.com, and are now using Google’s engine to power search within the site.

How the new search works

Right now, the search function works from the public site — if you want to search for something while you’re building a survey, open a new browser window and go to www.SurveyGizmo.com (our public site). The search box is visible on every page, and looks like this:

My search example is on piping, something that’s pretty useful if you know how to use it right. So, a little help might be in order, right?

After clicking the search button, my results come back. The cool thing about the results that Google returns is that they are broken up into tabs so you can choose what kind of help you want, as seen below. These are:

Tutorials: Help documentation that the staff of SurveyGizmo has put together that has step-by-step instructions on doing specific tasks.

Forums: Questions asked by SurveyGizmo account holders that are answered mostly by SurveyGizmo staff and sometimes by other SurveyGizmo users.

General: More helpful probably to people who are interested in finding out more about SurveyGizmo, this section will include FAQs, events, features and account pages.

We hope this change will help you better access the information that’s currently on the SurveyGizmo site while we spend more time building out other documentation improvements.