We’re thrilled to announce that Brittany Heidtke is the new online marketing manager for SurveyGizmo. She’ll be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades here spreading the word about SurveyGizmo, improving SEO, running our campaigns, monitoring analytics, and some blogging too we hope.
She lives in a world of landing pages, long-tail keywords, A/B split testing, and affiliate relationships. In her last role she was in charge of over twenty very successful online advertising accounts.
She hails from Chicago, graduated from university of Iowa, has three dogs, Gracie, Molly, and Sophie, and wants to find time to improve her fly fishing.
We are holding a contest with a year Pro subscription to SurveyGizmo up for grabs. SurveyGizmo wants you to create a mascot for us with the Spore™ Creature Creator, and in return 1 winner will be chosen to receive a 1 year Pro account at no charge! The best part is that there is no drawing talent required, just your infinite creativity. We are looking for a Spore™ mascot for this contest. Never heard of Spore™ before?
If not, now is the perfect time to get the free download of the Spore™ Creature Creator which allows you almost infinite flexibility in creating your own cutetwistedscary unique creature.
Most of the geeks here at SurveyGizmo fell in love with Spore™ as soon as we found out about it, Spore™ is game by Will Wright, the creator of The Sims™ and numerous other games. Spore the game doesn’t come out until the fall but the Spore Creature Creator is available now. We’ve seen the amazing creativity with online surveys that our users have created in SurveyGizmo, and now we want to see if you can channel that into creating a mascot for us. It’s actually pretty easy, requires no artistic talent, and it’s FUN! (more…)
Today is the Denver region’s Bike to Work Day. Last year they had 20,000 participants!
Today, four of us from the Boulder SurveyGizmo made the trip into the office on two wheels. We do what we can at SurveyGizmo to be green and keep our carbon footprint as low as possible for a survey company. We recycle most waste and a lot of folks travel into the office most days via foot, bike, or bus rather than car. We are even evaluating a plant a tree program tied to upgrades. Do you have any ideas for us?
The SurveyGizmo will not be entering the Tour de France this year.
Pictured are Toi, Scott, Derek, and Chad.
Until about two minutes ago, my mini-bio at the bottom of these posts said I was “the new guy.” Today I’m happy to announce that we have a new “new guy.” A few weeks ago we announced that we were looking for a new account manager/tech support rep. We got a lot of great applications and narrowing it down to just one was hard. That said, we all were impressed when Mario Lurig walked through the door. He has a solid background in customer service and has the right combination of friendly attitude technical skill to solve the often-thorny issues that fill up the support queue.
He’s also a self-starter, which is obviously a big plus in a startup. To give you an idea of what that means, Mario, a philosophy major in college, decided to teach himself PHP. That’s pretty cool all by itself, but considering that everyone around here also taught themselves PHP, it’s pretty much par for the course at SurveyGizmo HQ.
But Mario went one step further. In order to really dig deep and get a solid understanding, Mario proceeded to write a frickin’ book about PHP! (Get it here.) So now Mario is both an account manager and the unofficial PHP reference for those of us who are too lazy to go look it up ourselves.
Mario geeks out about technology like the rest of us, so we know he’ll fit right in. Bonus points to anyone who can guess what t-shirt he’s wearing in the picture above. (Hint.)
Well, really Derek has been lurking around the office for a bit now, impressing us all with his unicycling skills. But, now, we’ve got the official paperwork so we’re announcing it to the world.
Derek takes on the role of VP of Sales and Business Development for SurveyGizmo, and we couldn’t be happier to have him working with us. Here’s the official press release text for more of the juicy details:
Derek Scruggs, Internet Entrepreneur, joins SurveyGizmo as partner
Scruggs will serve as VP of Sales and Business Development for the online survey software provider
Boulder, CO, May 22, 2008: SurveyGizmo, the online survey software, data collection and analysis tool, today announced that Derek Scruggs has joined the company as a partner, and will serve as Vice President of Sales and Business Development for the company. Scruggs has founded or co-founded numerous companies and worked in the Internet & software industries for 15 years, most recently as founder of The Enthusiast Group, a network of user-generated content sites focused on adventure sports. “Derek’s been an adviser to the company for a while, and we’re fortunate to bring him on board,” says Scott McDaniel, CEO for SurveyGizmo.
“I feel like I’m catching the train at just the right time,” says Scruggs. “They’ve built a terrific product that has attracted more than 800 paying customers with almost no sustained sales or marketing effort. I’m excited about the opportunity to help them grow the business to the next level while continuing to provide the support that SurveyGizmo customers have come to expect.” As Vice President of Sales and Business Development, Scruggs will work on partnership integrations and large-scale customers with complex needs. SurveyGizmo already integrates with ExactTarget email software and solutions, as well as SalesForce.com, the online Customer Relationship Management tool.
“As we grow, these larger, enterprise customers demand a more personalized sales experience, and have greater requirements for integration than our other customers,” says McDaniel. “Derek is taking on their specific needs.”
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.
For all you Facebook folks, we’ve recently added a SurveyGizmo product page on Facebook. So, now you can become a fan of your favorite online survey software tool.
We’ll be using that page to also let you know about upcoming webinars and other events we’ll be at, plus, you can post to The Wall any comments or tips you might have for other users. Check out the page on Facebook.
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.
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.
We sometimes get asked by new customers to help them “sell” SurveyGizmo into their company. Meaning, they are sold on us, but, others on staff are using some other online survey tool — one that makes this person crazy because it just can’t provide what we can — and they need what SurveyGizmo’s got. They want to get the rest of the company on board with SurveyGizmo because of the economies of scale and, well, it just makes a lot of sense for the company to use the same survey system across different departments for data sharing purposes.
So, in response to that, we asked some of our customers the top reasons why they’ve switched, and put that together into a handy-dandy (and darn good looking) pdf titled 10 reasons to switch to SurveyGizmo. Some of those reasons include the true ability to do branded surveys, multi-language survey creation and better reporting.
Tonight I did a demo of SurveyGizmo at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. I was fortunate to get a few laugh lines, but the credit really goes to Scott for putting together some nice screen shots and helping me work out exactly what to present.
A typical client demo or webinar can go on for up to an hour. Cramming the highlights into five minutes was like explaining the intricacies of quantum mechanics as “basically, a lot of weird unpredictable stuff happens.”
It’s especially gratifying to hear what David Cohen had to say:
Thank The Magic Diety in the Sky for SurveyGizmo, who is doing well and is having an open house at their new digs in downtown Boulder later this week. The room erupted with glee when they showed actual technology that was cool, as well as “a demo of Keynote transitions.” SurveyGizmo has a very deep and well established product for creating, managing, and analyzing surveys. If you’ve experienced Survey Monkey, it’s kinda like that but has a more “enterprise” feel and is targeted slightly upmarket. It has nice-to-have features such as two-way Salesforce integration and stuff like scalability (they currently handle 20-40k responses per minute). Pricing ranges from free to $159/month. Go check it out if you need to find out what people think, and you need it to be real.
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.
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.
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.
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!
We are happy to announce the successful launch of SurveyGizmo’s New Email Invitation & Reminder Tool!
In 2007 we saw a huge interest in our old email invitation tool. Many marketers, researchers, educators and agencies all rely on email invitations as their primary technique for driving survey responses.
Well, they should love our new tool. It’s now easier to get complete surveys then ever before — and more reliable too!
Here’s a quick summary of this feature and instructions to get you started:
Click a thumbnail for a larger image:
It’s Easy to Understand & Use
The most important thing we have done is to streamline the invitation screens to make creating, monitoring and managing the invitation process easier.
The process of creating an invitation is simple. Click on the ‘Create Invite’ button and then Edit your invitation’s message. One other improvement here is the ability to create both text and html email content. HTML content allows you to brand your email invitations to look just like your other email communications. Having text content gives SurveyGizmo the ability to automatically fallback to the text version when it suspects some of your email recipients don’t support HTML emails.
Scheduling & Auto-Reminders
Reminder emails can be sent manually, automatically skipping over any users who have already completed the survey. The following two paragraphs represent future improvements to email invitations.
There have been a lot of marketing studies about the best times to send emails depending on your audience. Well, with our new email invite tool you can pre-schedule an invitation to be sent — and also define a series of auto-reminders to be sent out x-days after a person receives the first invite!
“Does adding contacts after the first send mess up the auto responders?”
No! SurveyGizmo treats each person as an individual subscriber — so they’ll get auto-reminders x-days out from the time they first got their personal invitation. Also, SurveyGizmo will automatically stops sending remindersafter the person completes their survey.
Content Testing & Spam Scores
There is nothing quite like sending out an email invitation only to realize a misspelling or poorly worded phrase has triggered every spam filter on the planet.
Now SurveyGizmo tests your content during the test phase and gives you your SPAM Score and outlines any other problems you might have.
Optimized Deliverability
Our new email software automatically manages a number of deliverability issues to help get your message through. SurveyGizmo now reports on bounces, unsubscribes and throttles delivery to domains such as yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol, etc.
Unsubscribe Handling
This was the *most* asked for feature in 2007. SurveyGizmo automatically manages unsubscribe requests and will honor requests by your subscribers to stop getting email invitations.
Furthermore, because we *are* a survey company, you can provide an unsubscribe survey on the ‘unsub’ page and get feedback as to why they left your list.
Single Sends
Need to send an email invite to one person at a time? Odd as that may seem — it’s a common real-world need. Sometimes you forget to send an invite to someone until after you main blast has gone.
Now it’s as easy adding a single contact and pressing ’send’. They will get all the personalized reminders and be included in the invite’s tracking and stats.
Intergation via API
That’s right, our new SOAP API is completely integrated with our invitation system. You can manage contacts, lists, invites, messages, trigger sends, check spam scores… everything our application does natively. The API is free for all account levels, but you do need to contact support to gain access to these features.
Suggestions & Comments?
We hope you all make good use of our email invitation tool and enjoy it. If you have any suggestions and comments please make them below or email our team at support@sgizmo.com. Your continued feedback and support is what drives our improvements to SurveyGizmo!
Lately we’ve been getting a lot of interest in our ExactTarget module, which is basically just an ExactTarget-specific implementation of our API.
So much interest, in fact, that we thought perhaps we should, you know, document how it works. So, without further ado, here’s our ExactTarget Integration Tutorial.
After a lot of customer requests we are bringing out SurveyGizmo user training webinars and demos. Whether you are evaluating a purchase of SurveyGizmo and want to see what all the fuss is about, or you want to take your survey building to the next level — SurveyGizmo webinars are the answer.
There is a lot of power under the hood, so come learn how to make the most of it. Check ‘em out and feel free to register for as many as you’d like. Take two they’re small.
All webinars are free and open to everyone
All webinars are live and not recorded, so you can ask questions
First let me tell you, Google Alerts are a *wonderful* thing. Today for example Google sent me a link to a short blog article/guide that compares four survey tools for not-for-profit users. The guide is quite brief and concise — well worth a look.
The blog post was on Idealware who, in their own words, provide “candid Consumer-Reports-style reviews and articles about software of interest to nonprofits.”
In the blog them mention five questions you should ask yourself when you are evaluating survey software. I’d repeat them here, but I’ll suggest instead that you read the article (I don’t want to steal any thunder). The comparisons in the article are useful for both not-for-profit and profit oriented organizations.
After working with dozens of non-profits I would mention one other big point to consider: you should pick an accessible survey tool. In fact, if you are grant funded you may need to pick online tools that meet certain accessibility criteria. Which is something our software does well and we are dedicated to.
I encourage everyone considering a new survey tool to read this quick review.
PS: Thanks, Laura at Ideaware for listing us in your guide!
Expanded client base plus 3rd party platform integration fuel growth
Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts – SurveyGizmo, an online survey and data collection company, today announced their 2007 results, showing year-over-year customer growth of more than 500%. “We’re really pleased at how quickly SurveyGizmo has been embraced by the online survey market,” said Scott McDaniel, CEO of SurveyGizmo. “Our customers tell us that our combination of extremely robust features along with tenacious customer service makes us unique in the market.”
SurveyGizmo’s key 2007 highlights:
• 1,500% revenue growth from 2006 to 2007
• Customers in 64 countries and surveys deployed in 129 countries
• Key customers include CMP Media, Apple, Gulfstream, Adobe, TechTarget, Business.com, UC Berekely, Nielsen Business Media, Reed Business Information, Nestle Purina
• New features released in 2007 include new reporting module, email invitation module, support for quizzes, new themes and templates
• Mobile phone/iPhone application at ipoll.surveygizmo.com
Plus, SurveyGizmo expanded integration into 3rd party platforms such as Exact Target for email marketing and Salesforce.com for sales and customer relationship management. “Integration into these platforms helps expand the use of our application across departments within a customer,” said Christian Vanek, CTO of SurveyGizmo.
About SurveyGizmo
SurveyGizmo 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.
Today, we stumbled upon a great review of SurveyGizmo on a blog about marketing research technology. Mark Kupferman goes into great detail about us (actually, it might be even better than the guide one our own website!) starting with this statement:
“SurveyGizmo is among the most easy to use, best priced, feature packed internet survey software packages I have seen. And I’ve seen a number of them. I highly recommend it….[SurveyGizmo] includes just about everything you need. And it’s easy…very Web 2.0ish.”
Of course, this caught our attention immediately.
He also writes that SurveyGizmo “includes some really fancy question types that I’ve never seen anywhere else.”
Mark gives a great rundown on some of our unique features and states “I think it is fair to say that many of the features available in SurveyGizmo aren’t even available in many of the paid packages I’ve tried. ”
Two weeks ago we wrote a post describing how to pass information into SurveyGizmo from Google Adwords. Very nifty! *This week* we are going to pass information from SurveyGizmo into Google Analytics. Even niftier, huh?
Why would we want to do this? Well, Google Analytics is a very powerful (and free) web analytics suite. With it you can track survey conversions, path analysis, sources of surveys traffic and even various versions of your forms and surveys. It’s the best of both worlds.
So let’s get the ball rolling:
Introduction to Google Integration Code
When you create a Google Analytics account you are given code snippets and instructed to place them at the bottom of each page on your website. For use in surveys, you will need to add them to the HTML Template of your Survey’s Theme.
There are two parts of the code you are asked to embed: 1) A javascript library that Google provides and 2) a little snippet of javascript code that actually triggers the analytics record.
The first part looks like this:
You should place this bit of code at the top of your survey’s HTML template (the very top).
The second part looks like:
So, where does this part go? Well, first we are going to modify this bit just a little. Why? Because we want to track individual survey pages, and make them a bit easier to understand in Google Analytics.
So, here is what we are going to do. We are going to pass an argument (a bit of data) to the urchinTracker function that will identify individual pages of the survey. We are also going to create a ‘fake’ folder for our survey. So change this second bit of code to:
You should replace ’surveyname’ for every survey you integrate. Make it distinct and understandable. The merge code [%%:Survey_Page%%] will merge in the current page number. Tip: If you want to get fancier you can merge in the value of a hidden question on the page, or even question data from previous pages this way.
Place this modified code at the very bottom of the HTML Template.
Congratulations. When you launch your survey, it will store the navigation and traffic information to your Google Analytics account!
From here you can treat your “surveys” folder like it was just another part of your website. You can run your favorite reports, build charts graphs, etc. Enjoy!
Next week we will look into test variations of your surveys and landing pages and doing analysis in Google Analytics.
In the past two months we have received a huge number of questions concerning Google and SurveyGizmo integration. We’ve gotten so many, in fact, that we decided to write a three-part article that shows everyone how to do just that.
This week: Part 1 - Tracking Keywords and Ad Type from Adwords
Next week: Part 2 - Using the A/B/C Splitter to Test Landing Page Variations
Finally: Part 3 - Hooking Your Survey up with Google Analytics & Conversion Funnels
This week we are going to show you how to link a landing page in SurveyGizmo to a Google Adword’s campaign and how to pass valuable information from Google into SurveyGizmo. The two pieces of information we are going to track are: 1) the keyword that triggered your Ad’s clickthrough and 2) whether your ad was shown on a search results page or on the content network.
Let’s leap right in:
Step 1 - Create your Offer Landing Page
Naturally, before we can go into Adwords and set up our campaign, we need to create a Landing Page for the offer. So, what exactly is a “landing page”?
Definition of a Landing Page
The destination web Page for people responding to an advertisement, designed specifically for that campaign and audience. The key difference between a home page and a landing page is that the former must be all things to all visitors, while the landing page should be narrowly designed to optimize conversion for a specific campaign.
The easiest way to create a landing page in SurveyGizmo is to create a new survey with our landing page template and then add your own text and images. Remember, with SurveyGizmo you can brand your landing page any way you want; our templates are just starting points.
Here are some tips for your landing page:
Don’t ask for more information than you need. Each ‘extra’ field you ask for might cost you valuable leads.
If you have a complicated qualification process, break it up into a few pages.
Remember, you have all of SurveyGizmo’s features at your disposal. You can ask qualification questions or make your landing page interactive with Show/Hide logic!
Step 2 - Linking Google to your Landing Page
After you create your landing page, you need to setup your AdWord’s campaign to link to it. So, from your Adword’s control panel, copy the Survey Link that we provide you and paste it into the Adwords destination URL box.
Now here is the cool trick!
We want to track which keywords are generating conversions. To do that, we tag a little extra line after our survey url, like this:
This works becuase SurveyGizmo will automatically track data sent through the URL!
Now that we have keyword and ad type tied to every response, we can look at conversion as a whole, as in the report below. Just make sure to check off “Include URL Tokens in Summary report” for your report options:
Or, to get a more in-depth look, we can create a report that filters based on keyword and ad type.
If you are a Free user, you’ll have to export your data into Excel to see these keywords, but at the Pro level you get access to filtering so you can create reports right in SurveyGizmo.
That’s it for this week. If you have questions feel free to post them in the comments for this blog post. I’ll answer them as soon as I can.
Next week: We will show you how to perform A/B split tests on your landing page to see which version and offer text work best!
What is a good way to create a subset data for the ones who participated the survey? And what is a good way to create a pool of people who agreed to participate in an interview?
Scott - If you are looking to separate participators in the email invitation process, our email invite tool helps you segment your list based on whether they answered the survey or not. If you export your survey data you’ll have only the folks who participated; you then use this as the basis of a follow survey, email invite or survey data pre-population. As for Interview participation, you could also ask a question in the survey about their willingness and then use that field to sort or filter the results.
Can you collect emails for reward incentives SEPARATELY from main responses so that anonymity is preserved?
Christian - Yes, you could redirect the Thank You page of the first survey to another survey to collect the personal information. This would make them separate data stores. The transfer could be seamless to the user.
Does SurveyGizmo allow you to separate those who have taken the survey with those who haven’t taken it? That way those who have completed the survey will not get the reminder.
Scott - If you use our Email Invitation tool you can easily create email follow-ups based on status, i.e. send reminders to non-takers or share results only with survey takers in a separate email.
Can pictures be presented as a part of the survey question? (Think: Which is better at communicating the idea of safety? for example.)
Christian - Yes, you can use the SurveyGizmo Image Chooser question type.
Is there a simple mechanism for feature requests and bug reports for SurveyGizmo?
Christian - Absolutely. You can post them to special forums we have created for these purposes. See - http://www.surveygizmo.com/forum/
Is it a good idea to send an email asking if the person is interested in being included in surveys or is it more accurate to send the survey out to the membership as a whole? Will SurveyGizmo create a random sampling list of my contact list?
Ed - Send to everyone or sample at random. Of course you can never make someone respond so in some respects samples are self-selected.
Scott - An auto sampling tool is in development. Please feel free to share comments or features you’d like to see in http://www.surveygizmo.com/forum/
Is it possible to convert answers from a 5 point scale to a 10 point scale and maintain validity in the results? For questions that use a numeric scale for their answers, do you have a recommendation for what that scale should be (0-4, 1-10, etc…)?
Ed - You can easily make a linear transformation to go from a 5 point scale to a 10 point scale; by multiplying by two. As answered during the webinar, I recommend a 5-pt scale or in some cases a 7-pt scale.
Is there a specific time of week or day in the US that is proven to be more successful to send surveys? Where can we get information as to how to formulate questions as to not guide the answers we want.
Yes, for email invitations it is best to avoid the beginning and end of the week, i.e. Tues through Thursday is best.
Vanek says ROI “should not be measured based on the number of responses you collect, but on the effect that the knowledge you gained has for your organization.”
The article is packed full of solid tips and is a good review if you use our survey email invitation tool to drive traffic to your surveys. The article is free for seven days only, and after that you will need to be a MarketingSherpa member to read it. So go quickly! and check it out.
By the way, SurveyGizmo will also be featured in MarketingSherpa upcoming buyer’s guide to survey software and services.
Join survey experts Dr. Ed Halteman and Christian Vanek, as they discuss ten of the most important best practices for surveying. If you are running a survey anytime in the next year — you can’t afford to miss this event.
When: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th at 2PM EASTERN TIME
You’ll learn:
* Ten Tips that cover the entire process from brainstorming to reporting
* Real world examples from Christian and Ed’s past projects
* How to use simple tools to increase your response rate
* Survey testing methodology
* How to choose questions & word your surveys correctly
And that doesn’t cover half of it. Reserve your seat below and we’ll give you the conference instructions. We will be recording this webinar; however, for the best experience, you should join us live.
Wikispaces, an online self-service tool for creating your own wiki has integrated a SurveyGizmo survey/poll widget. The widget makes it easy to add a survey, poll, or contact form directly into your Wikispaces wiki page.
Wikispaces is a great service that allows your group, club, team, etc. to have a central place to share information and allows everyone to group edit it. Our widget shares shelf space with Google, YouTube, Skype, and Flickr. We encourage you to take a look.
Just a quick notice announcing a long overdue feature here at SurveyGizmo, Spell Check.
We are happy to announce that we have finally activated the spell check for the WYSIWYG editor we use.
Now bad spellers, such as myself, can click on a simple button to spell check their questions & descriptions! Not much more we can say about that! We’ll be adding the spell check to the Bulk Edit tool for multiple choice options too.
SurveyGizmo’s online survey software is, if we say so ourselves, pretty darn user-friendly. But you might have a special project and need some programming, integration or other technical aid. Or maybe you want your survey to have a branded look and feel.Or you have old data you want to import into SurveyGizmo. Whatever the case, we can help.
The SurveyGizmo staff of designers, technicians, developers and survey experts is ready to help you on your next survey project. We now offer affordable data import, survey build and custom integration services. You’ll find all the details, including an online request form, in our Support/Community section.
We saw a nice spike in traffic the other day when CNET covered iPoll in their iPhone Apps section. This was a nice surprise, because we hadn’t seen iPoll covered since we released it back in July during the debut of the iPhone. iPoll is our free, quick polling service. You can ask your friends where to go to dinner, take a vote during a meeting, or even ask the world their opinion on a question.
Oh and don’t forget you don’t even need an iPhone! You can use iPoll with any web browser and a wide variety of web enabled phones. Give iPoll a try.
When we got the packet in the mail titled “Hey, did you know…?” we thought it was pretty cool that the third, fourth and fifth graders at the Edith Bowen Laboratory School in Logan, Utah, put together an almanac and shared it with us. And what was even cooler is that they used SurveyGizmo to create the class project.
The students came up with almost four dozen fun questions, and the final project is packed with neat info, such as “Do you think Snape is good or evil?” (65% say he’s evil) and “What is chef Heather’s best lunch?” (Apparently she cooks up an awesome pizza.)
The questions are accompanied by snazzy graphics; we love the SurveyGizmo charts and colorful clip art. Dr. Wallin’s class organized the data and laid out the pages – nice work, everyone!
SXSW Interactive is a fantastic conference (heck, we don’t need to tell you that), and we think it’s so great that we want to take part by speaking at the festival in Austin next March.
We’ve pitched 6 ideas to the organizers:
Speed Dating for Coders and Designers: Find your Business Mate.Are you entrepreneurially minded? Do you need to find a talent to match against your own? They say partnerships are like marriages, but how do you find one and make it successful? This session is half tips, strategies, and experiences from the presenters and half interactive session to meet and greet other attendees and make connections.
Conquest Through Integration: Building Partnerships Via API.APIs are not just a tool for developers. This session demonstrates how to create partnerships and business opportunities centered around integration through open APIs. Learn how to partner with Fortune 500 companies ten times your size and establish marketing partnerships centered around integration.
GTD for Startups: Getting Things Done in the Real World. We’ve all heard about processing your Inbox, proactive instead of reactive, and ‘Next Action’ lists, but how do you put this into real and varied workflows. We’ll share the actual tips, apps, and collaborative tools that help us implement GTD practices in when managing web development, publishing, customer service, and employees.
Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid! When Not to Use Frameworks.Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails have received a lot of hype and press in the Web 2.0 community. However, frameworks are not always the best choice for a project. The session focuses on successful products that don’t use frameworks, or did… and wish they hadn’t.
Startups and Workflows: Tools, Tips, and Strategies that Work. What collection of development, design, and collaboration tools make up the workflow of different roles in a startup? What’s in the bag of tricks that help a designer, developer, and serial entrepreneur get through their day-to-day?
Blitzkrieg! Rapid Fire Tips on Design, Dev & Business.Experience a whirlwind of pointers as each of our four panelists compete to get 30 action-ready tips in out in under 15 minutes each. Each panelist shares tips from their experiences covering topics that include: Development, Business, Marketing & Design.
If you think any of these are good ideas, you can help make them reality. SXSW wants your feedback. Just head to the SXSW Panel Picker, where you can rate any of the hundreds of potential panels. (Hint: The easiest way to find our panels is to type “surveygizmo” in the Search engine.) Just click on a panel’s title to get the detailed description. You’ll have to register before you can rate the panels, but it’s a free, quick and painless process.
UPDATE: Space is filling up fast, so get in now if you’re interested
Day: Tues, August 21st
Time: 3pm Eastern Time
Topic: New features & tips, plus time- saving methods for effective survey building
Your Hosts:
Co-founders:
Christian Vanek,
Scott McDaniel
Learn why, with all of our new features & upgrades, SurveyGizmo is the best online survey tool - now more than ever. Build better surveys more quickly and more flexibly than ever before. Learn how.
About the “New Feature Round-up” Teleseminar
One comment we receive often is that it’s hard to keep up with all the enhancements and new features at SurveyGizmo. Heck, it seems like we add something revolutionary every other week! That’s why we are holding this teleseminar. During which you’ll be intoduced to:
Features like these :
Duplicate Protection & Anonymous Surveys
9 New Question & Follow up Actions (37 total)
Build Accessible surveys (we are now Section 508 compliant)
Mobile Surveys, Polls & Text Messaging
Full foreign language support (UTF-8)
Email Invitations
Triggered Survey Invites
A full-featured XML-based API!
Password protected surveys
and UI upgrades like these:
GeoTracking & a World Map of your survey responses
9 New Themes and Ways to Customize Them
New Logic & Branching Interface
User/Security Permissions for Different User Roles
Cross Tabulation & Report Filtering
even these initiatives…
An Affiliate Program
HIPPA and Safe Harbor Certs
iPoll for iPhone
Webinar space is limited. Click Here to Learn More and Register. Cick here to register now.
For more information
call (800) 609-6480 Ext 1
We are happy to announce that SurveyGizmo finally supports non-English characters completely as of this past weekend. For those of you located or who survey outside of the US, this should be welcome news indeed!
Previously, certain sections of the SurveyGizmo application would “garble” non-English characters — making your surveys unattractive and unreadable. Thanks to a lot of help from our customers in the Netherlands, we were finally able to solve this problem.
Also, we are looking for volunteers to help us translate SurveyGizmo into other languages. If this sounds like a project that interests you, please let us know. We are giving away free lifetime Professional accounts to individuals who help us translate our tool into a new language.
Best of luck on all your survey projects!
-The SurveyGizmo Team
Special Note: If you currently have a survey in SurveyGizmo that uses these characters, please check your survey over carefully. Our switch to become an international survey tool required us to switch to UTF-8 (a character code standard) from ISO-8859. Because of this you should confirm that your survey looks good now in UTF8 (only if you have surveys published in languages other than English). If you see any problems, just update the question that looks garbled once last time - and you will be good to go.
Over last weekend and Monday night, we at SurveyGizmo migrated the heart of our services to a new network of servers in San Antonio, Texas. It was necessary to move to better, faster machines because of the huge number of new customers who have started using our services in the past two months.
I’m happy to say that the migration is now complete. Thanks to everyone who pointed out migration issues over the last few days. We have a few minor changes that we will make over this weekend to ensure stability and make good use of the power of these new machines.
Here are the benefits of the new servers. I’m sure you will agree that it was worth it!
Improved Speed & Security
Your survey data is now safer than it has ever been before! Our special server setup now keeps your data safe behind a firewall, stored on its own set of databases and encrypted storage. This means there is no direct access to your data from the internet, and the format of the data is not easy to reconstruct even in a worst case scenario. Our application servers and API connect to these servers over a very fast private connection. This, combined with a generous amount of memory and more processors, allows us to make SurveyGizmo really fly! (Some speed improvements will require a few changes to the application after the migration.)
Thanks again to everyone who helped iron out small bugs and glitches during this migration period. We will work through the weekend looking for any remaining issues. If you find any, as always let us know and we will jump on them!
We have had a big response to our iPoll application. There have been well over 10,000 hits, and hundreds of users have created polls in the past few days. Now we have added a social networking aspect to iPoll. You can ask the world to cast their vote on your poll, and the world in turn can promote or demote your question based on how worthy they think it is. Current and high ranking polls will float to the top of the list.
Try it out below — you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)
Yes, you can still mark polls not to be public and send them to just friends, coworkers or customers. Those uses are still fully embraced, but now you can ask a broader audience or even just burn a few minutes surfing and voting while you wait for your train.
Like thousands of other people across the US, the team here at SurveyGizmo got a bad case of iPhone fever last Friday. We didn’t intend on actually buying the iPhone ourselves — but it was too slick to resist during our visit to the Apple store.
To celebrate the iPhone (and convince our bookkeeper that is was a business expense), we created our own iPhone Application, called iPoll. You can use iPoll to create short one questions polls on your iPhone and send them out to your friends, co-workers and iPhone contacts. It’s totally free.
Do you have an iPhone?
You can try our app by browsing to http://ipoll.surveygizmo.com (don’t forget to bookmark it). This app is *very* lightweight — you can use it over AT&T’s network without getting old and gray waiting for page loads.
For those of you without iPhone, you can still use the application. The iPhone image below is actually a working copy. (The only difference is that the iPhone itself never displays scroll bars.)
One caveat: This was written for the iPhone — so you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)
COOL! What can I do with iPoll?
Here are some ideas!
Build your poll on the fly. You can use an iPhone, a web browser, and quite possibly other web-enabled cell phones. You can visit this page or go to http://iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com
Email your poll to friends, family, coworkers, customers, etc.
Watch the will of the mob, possibly change your mind, or help make a decision
Here are some examples of what you could do with a mobile poll
We received our first notice of a 3rd party application created with our API. Anyone who uses iGoogle dashboards to organize their lives is going to love this.
Bryan Richards, Editorial Director of Linux Magazine, developed a Google gadget for SurveyGizmo! Just like our Apple Widget and WordPress Plug-in, the gadget displays your surveys and number of responses and allows you to access the advanced features for those surveys by clicking on the row. Excellent job, Bryan!
How to Setup and Use the Google Widget
From your iGoogle home page click on the “add stuff” link (usually at the upper right corner of the screen).
Then choose the “add from URL” option and type (or copy and paste) this URL into the box:
http://bryanjrichard.googlepages.com/sgizmo.xml
Now the SurveyGizmo widget will be added to your iGoogle Home page. You’ll have to enter your API key into the space provided, then you are ready to roll (get your API key from your Account Settings page).
We love to see our customers using our API for cool things. If you’ve created a project without API (or want to) let us know about it. We will rave about your nifty invention.
We have seen a lot of interest recently in SurveyGizmo’s accessibility features and how our surveys meet current accessibility and usability standards, such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act or the British version the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act). We are happy to report we meet Section 508 (and likely the DDA as well). Customers reviewing survey tools tell us SurveyGizmo is the most accessible survey tool on the market.
An accessibility study group at UC Berkley did an accessibility comparison of online survey tools this spring and found that SurveyGimzo came out on top. Around the same time, the Usability Professionals’ Association ran a recent article comparing SurveyGizmo and another survey tool vendor.
“Because we found an accessible tool, we stopped our search and deployed a survey with SurveyGizmo. Survey creation and activation was simple, and the results were easy to gather. But most importantly for us, our users with disabilities reported no difficulties in accessing, completing, and submitting the survey.”
Why should you care if your surveys are accessible?
First, being accessible means meeting a variety of requirements in the HTML that make your survey easier to use by people who may be attempting to access them under non-traditional circumstances. For instance:
A blind user reading and navigating with a screen reader
A user with a broken hand trying to navigate solely with the keyboard
Anyone with reduced motor controls who has trouble clicking precisely
Anyone with vision issues who desires larger type or higher contrast colors (think aging baby-boomers)
Offering better accessibility in your surveys means a larger and more satisfied audience. Many of our competitors’ surveys rely solely on JavaScript and mouse interactions, making it impossible to navigate a survey and answers questions using only a keyboard.
I’ve pushed for accessible, Web Standards based design for years and have thrown my hat in the ring to promote it in the past. When I designed our web survey templates over a year ago, accessibility issues were top of mind, and we are currently working on some enhancements to improve things still further.
We will also feature an in-depth article on Building Accessible Surveys in the near future. In the meantime, let us know if we can answer any of your questions on accessible survey design.
This is a great example of how everyone’s feedback is making SurveyGizmo better. So many of you asked for user-based permissions that we bumped it to the top of our list. Among other things, this feature allows you to create separate logins with restricted access to surveys and features in SurveyGizmo. You can create reporting-only users and survey-testing users. Heck, you can even lock a user down to a specific survey. Here is how it works:
Setting User Permissions in SurveyGizmo
User permissions are available for all Pro and Enterprise Accounts. (These are our two account levels that allow more than a one user.)
To create a new user, click on your account management link in the upper right side of your screen. It will take you to a brand new page that looks like this:
Click on the User Management & Permissions option (circled above). This is how you access all of your users for resetting passwords, changing email addresses, etc.
Now, you’ll see a screen like this:
This is works like an excel sheet. Simply edit the information you need to change. You can select the “delete” option to remove a user.
By default, all users have full account access (except new users are not given administrative access). To change this, click the “change” permissions link next to the user. This brings up a detail screen shown below:
This screen is very simple. Select as many permissions as you want; the options are:
Can Edit/Create Surveys
This option allows the user to create/copy/delete surveys. It also allows the user to upload images & files to the file library. It includes the ability to test surveys — obviously!).
Can Preview/Test Surveys
This option allows the user to preview/test surveys, but they cannot access data collected or modify the survey in any way. They do not have permission to launch a survey.
Can Launch/Close Surveys
This option allows the user to launch a survey and schedule it in a feed. It also allows the user to close the survey (stop taking responses) manually.
Can Create, Edit & Launch Email Invites
This option allows the user to upload a list of email addresses and invite people to take a survey. It does not include access to reporting by default, but they can see which people responded to the invite and send follow-ups.
Can Create & Edit Reports
This option allows the user to create, modify and run reports. They can export data and create filter sets. These users can also edit & delete responses (in order to clean up data for reporting).
Can View & Re-Run Reports
This provides very limited access to surveys. It allows the user to login and view reports created by other users — but they cannot create new reports themselves. This access level cannot export data.
Is an Administrator
This does not give access to everything as it might imply. Instead, it gives the user access to the account management page. There they can reset passwords (and permissions) and update account management “stuff,” like 3rd party software integration and API keys.
Limit access to the following survey:
This is a nifty permission. Setting this will limit the user’s access to just a single survey — now matter what other permissions they have. They will not see other surveys at all — even on the main survey list.
Keep giving use feedback and suggestions to make SurveyGizmo better. Happy Surveying!
Very few people create surveys out of boredom or simply for fun. Those few that do (such as myself) should seek professional help (I recommend my therapist).
No, when we create surveys, it is for a specific reason – to gain knowledge about a topic or issue so that we can make important decisions, publish reports or gain new customer leads.
From that perspective the success of a survey campaign should be measured not in terms of the data collected, but what you are able to *do* with the knowledge you gain.
The most important factor in a successful survey project is having a plan (and the intent) to follow through with the data.
Here is a guide to help you create a better survey and an effective, efficient post-survey action plan:
SurveyGizmo: Quick Action-Plan Guide
Step 1: Why do you need to run a survey, research or lead generation campaign?
I bet you already know why you need to run a survey. Well, great — this step is done; just write it down on a sticky pad or a white board.Refer to this purpose behind the campaign over the next few steps when deciding what questions to ask and what you can do with your data. If you are working on a team, make sure everyone has a copy of this goal (in written format, unless you work with telepaths).
Big Organization Tip: If you are going to be working with upper management or multiple departments, it’s a good idea to get their buy-in to this goal at the beginning. It sets expectations and makes it easier to push back on late additions to your survey during testing and design.
Step 2: Map Your Process — What are you going to do with the data?
This is a huge question. Your answer has to be specific and should lend itself toward a direct and feasible action. For example:A. We will decide which new website feature to concentrate on first. (good)
B. We will learn what our customers want out of our website. (bad)
C. Learn why people are leaving our website without buying anything. (bad)
D. Tell IT what parts of our online store to change to reduce abandoned shopping carts. (good)
C. We will send customers who are ready to buy to sales, those that are not will get another marketing message in 3 months. (good)
D. We will produce an executive summary for marketing and compile the other information into a research guide. (good)
So why is (b) so bad? It sounds like an admirable goal, right? Well, compare it to (a), which states what action you are going to take with the data you collect. Learning for the sake of learning is admirable – but learning something with the intent to act on it is far more practical.
Keep the actions you are planning as realistic as possible with the resources allocated for your project. If your actions involve other departments or teams – make sure you get buy-in from them at this point.
This is a great time to build a decision tree, which will outline what actions will be most effective based on your data. That way you can present a clear action plan based on your data quickly when the results come in.
Again, this part of the plan, while important, does not have to take more than a few minutes.
Step 3: Design & Build.
Design your survey questions (refer to our website for design tips) and build your survey carefully. You should do impromptu testing while building your survey and keep an eye out for ‘hang-ups” that might lead to abandonment.If you are using other elements in your research (email blasts, auto-responders, text messages, etc), you should get these designed and ready too.
Ideally this is not a group effort – or at least not a large group. We suggest you place a single person in charge, and they need to have the authority to say “no” (politely) when upper management asks them to add questions into your project that are unrelated to your goal.
Step 4: Test your survey & follow-up process!
For the love of all things holy, please test your process before you launch it! If it means delaying a Thursday email blast until Monday – do it.Your testing should be as complete as possible. Invite co-workers, family, friends or a small population from your actual target list to take your survey and submit feedback.
Test your Message: Send your email invite or web-invitation. If you are doing a print survey, get a sample from the printer. Let other people proof the copy and message for errors and comprehension.
Test the Survey: Check required questions, field formatting and survey logic.
Test your Data: Look at your data in an export and in your reporting suite. Make sure you can produce the charts and datasets you need to act on.
Test your follow-through: If you are doing immediate follow-ups make sure your notification system works and those individuals responsible for the follow-ups are prepared to act on them.
The final go-ahead: Does the data you collect meet the needs of your goal and provide you with enough information to make informed decisions which you can act on immediately? If so, you are clear for launch!
Fix any problems you encounter. If you encountered more than a few, you should test repeatedly.
Step 5: Launch — Begin collecting data and doing any follow-ups actions.
At this point all your dominos should be lined up and waiting for the flick of your finger. Once you launch you should monitor your initial results and follow-up actions closely.You should have seeds in your invite list. Do quality control checks periodically as your survey is running. If you are running a continuous (or long term) project — this should become part of your weekly routine.
Step 6: Discover & Report — Analyze your data & communicate your findings.
When you have enough information collected in your survey for statistically valid results, you should begin running reports and looking for answers to your goal questions. Tip: try not to run reports before you have enough data – you might get excited about random patterns that appear in small data sets.When you prepare your findings, concentrate on the goals you set in step 2. Center your report on your action items and recommend the action-plan best supported by your data. There is usually is no need to include extra data – especially if you are preparing an executive summary.
Step 7: Action — Follow your well-crafted plan!
You have collected your research; you have analyzed the results and should have come to a conclusion. That wasn’t too bad…. and it’s all over, right?Ah, no. Sadly the work is just beginning, but thankfully it might not be you who has to do all of it! Now that you have your conclusion it’s time to act on it – which should be easy, because in step 2 you designed an action plan to go along with your results!
In many cases these action plans will involve other people – so be prepared to follow up with folks who receive your report. A little gentle nudging will help get the ball rolling.
A PARTING NOTE: after your project, mark a time in your calendar (not too distant) to begin analyzing the changes made based on your proposal and planning a follow-up project to ascertain if it had the intended effect.
Good luck with your survey projects — let us know if we can help you.
The Pareto principle (which you may know as the 80-20 rule) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.”
The Pareto principle also applies to survey research. When planning your survey project, plan on expending 20% of your resources on the survey execution (data collection) and 80% of your resources acting of the information gathered (follow-up actions).
Let me explain using an example:
I recently completed a survey project for the Taos Municipal School District (TMSD) in Taos, New Mexico. A year ago the school board formed a subcommittee with a charter to make recommendations for improving communication within the district.
The committee quickly decided they needed to do a survey in order to learn what problems existed and what solutions may work best. The need to do a survey project led them to me. My first task was to set expectations on two fronts:
The scope of communication within a school district is huge.
The survey project is not an end. Early in the design the focus needs to be on what is going to be done once the survey is complete.
After nearly a year with the “volunteer” committee meeting once a week, we had completed three surveys (one each to parents, staff and the community) and collected over 1,000 responses.
TMSD spent $12,500 and the volunteer time on the data collection and analysis. Does it seem reasonable that they might spend $50,000 and many many committee hours to implement solutions and improve communications? Let me help with some more information. The results showed that the problems and solutions were different for different schools within the district. It was clear communication was not going to improve unless changes were enacted; website upgrading, school improvement teams (high school, middle school and elementary schools), a district liaison to the community and a stronger relationship with the town’s newspaper were just some of the recommendations.
Will the information be used and changes enacted? There was a glimmer of hope right at the start: The study results were presented at a School Board meeting in the city council chambers. After seeing the results and hearing the recommendations, the board took action on one recommendation right there on the spot. The board voted on and passed a resolution to make “progress on improving communications” a standing agenda item for their monthly meetings. (In this case, the cycle time from results presentation to specific ACTION broke my old record!)
Do yourself and your customers a favor. Plan at the start to expend time and money on the implementation side of your next survey research project.
Now that we let people upload images, we thought we should give you a fun way to use them!
The new Image Chooser question type displays several images and allows your respondents to pick an image of their choice by clicking on it. Here’s what it looks like:
We can see some great uses for this, particularly for those of you who are testing logos and brand identity! And the good news is that it’s available for all accounts, even Free ones.
How to use add this question type to your survey:
All you need to do to use this question type is upload some images to your account (see our earlier post about uploading images) then go to your survey and click “add question.” The Image Chooser option is located with other multiple choice question types (as shown in the image below).
Just click on “Image Choice” and you’ll see a scrolling box with thumbnails of all your images. Choose the ones that you’d like to use for this question and then click the “Add this question” button. There! You now have a working image chooser.
As with all our questions, there are advanced options (like triggering other questions, etc) that can be accessed from the advanced question editor. You can also re-style the question using a little CSS magic.
Want to see a real-life example? From now until Weds, June 13th Big Fish Games (http://www.bigfishgames.com) is running a poll using this new image type. The poll is to determine a background option for their massive online community. Here it is: http://s-xi3q2-9564.sgizmo.com
We’re thrilled to announce that Brittany Heidtke is the new online marketing manager for SurveyGizmo. She’ll be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades here spreading the word about SurveyGizmo, improving SEO, running our campaigns, monitoring analytics, and some blogging too we hope.
We are holding a contest with a year Pro subscription to SurveyGizmo up for grabs. SurveyGizmo wants you to create a mascot for us with the Spore™ Creature Creator, and in return 1 winner will be chosen to receive a 1 year Pro account at no charge! The best part is that there is no drawing talent required, just your infinite creativity. We are looking for a Spore™ mascot for this contest. Never heard of Spore™ before?
Today is the Denver region’s 
Until about two minutes ago, my mini-bio at the bottom of these posts said I was “the new guy.” Today I’m happy to announce that we have a new “new guy.” A few weeks ago we 
For all you Facebook folks, we’ve recently added a SurveyGizmo product page on Facebook. So, now you can become a fan of your favorite online survey software tool.
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?
