SurveyGizmo - Online Survey Software : An Online Survey Tool for Creating Surveys, Polls, Forms and Quizes » How-to articles

Survey Tip: Create an IT Survey

Kipp Chambers — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:01:47 +0000

Sure, you can use SurveyGizmo to do market research and survey your customers – but you can also use our survey software internally to improve the day-to-day operations of your organization.

Several of our customers use our survey software for internal surveys within their businesses – for years we’ve powered job application surveys, human resources surveys, and more for organizations around the world.

But lately we’ve been seeing one new type of survey a lot: IT surveys.

Why IT Surveys?

There are a ton of reasons your IT department would want to create an IT survey. Here are a few:

Keep things documented. It’s good to have a record of how many support requests are coming in, and how many are quickly resolved.
Analyze company-wide IT issues. You can set up reports to see how many problems are coming from different machines, users, etc, then take action on them.
Make it easier for users to report IT problems. By creating a survey and embedding it (or posting a link) on your company intranet, users can easily submit their issues in one place. Having all your information centrally-located is much more efficient than trying to sort through instant messages, emails, and other channels.

What are some ways to make my IT surveys better?

SurveyGizmo offers a lot of features to improve IT surveys:

1. Use Show/Hide and Skip Logic to collect better data. By using survey logic like Show/Hide Logic and Page Jumping, you can ask specific questions that apply to specific recurring issues. Someone who can’t access the internet, for instance, would require different follow-up questions than someone who is having trouble with a virus.

By separating issues, you can also improve the processing of your IT support queue. It often makes much more sense to focus on several tickets you know are easily solvable and clearing them from the list before moving on to tackle bigger issues.

2. Auto-populate system information. Rather than ask your users to enter what sort of computer they have, you can pull that information automatically. The System merge codes let you include information on the user’s system configuration as part of your survey data.

Rather than pass the system info through as a hidden variable, we recommend displaying the information to the user via a merge code & asking them to verify that this is the machine they’re having trouble with.

Again, you can later use this system information in reports to determine which browsers and system configurations are causing the most problems throughout your company.

3. Create a queue. In a recent blog, we showed how we used the SurveyGizmo API to create a queue for our weekly Pancake Thursday breakfast. By employing that same technique, you can create a page for your IT support team to go through and check off the problems that have been solved, then automatically send a follow-up email or a report.

These are just a few of the SurveyGizmo features you can use to create IT surveys – if you can think of other ways to go about it, leave them in the comments!

Image courtesy of Jamie – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Order Up! (How We Hacked Our Survey API to Create a Food Ordering System)

Christian Vanek — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:33:36 +0000

The topic of this article is a bit off the well-beaten path for a survey tools blog. It just goes to show the cool and random things you can do with survey software that has an open survey API once you get to know it.

We don’t like to talk about ourselves this way, but survey software is really just a glorified web form with a backend. (I’m on vacation this week, so the sales team won’t be able to take revenge on me for saying that on our blog.)

What that means is if you are clever you can use our tool to solve a large number of office issues. The one I want to tell you about is what we call our “Order Up” system for Pancake Thursdays at SurveyGizmo.

Every Thursday we cook eggs, bacon, sausages, and pancakes (with chocolate chips in fun patterns) for the entire company. We started doing this recently, and given that there’s about fifty of us in the office now, the first time we had Pancake Thursday it took almost 6 hours to get everyone served! So the next Thursday morning we had an idea: we would send out a survey to get everyone’s order and create a simple widget using our API to show the orders as they come in. As an added bonus, it would notify each employee with an email once their order was ready!

We call it the “Order Up” system – and we can’t live without it.

The survey was pretty simple. We have just two survey questions: “What’s your email address?” and a checkbox question for what items from the menu you’d like to eat.

We also created a hidden field to flag if the order has been completed or not. The respondent never sees it – we flag it through the API when the order is ready for pickup.

We then used the survey API to create the cook’s screen. Michael is inevitably the cook each week (it was his idea). So he has a laptop set up in the kitchen which refreshes and shows him the orders as they come in. The Order Up Survey also tallies how many strips of bacon, eggs, etc that have been ordered in real-time so he can cook in bulk.

The entire system only took about an hour to set up, and it’s been a fun and easy way to make Pancake Thursdays work and get it down to only two hours of cooking. (Not to mention we’ve been hiring…so there’s that).

I mention this just as a suggestion to everyone — keep your eyes open for neat ways that a data collection tool can be used to optimize all the little internal processes at your company. If you have an idea or have an unconventional way you’re using our survey software in your company, let us know!

If you are curious, here’s the (very dirty) PHP code that we used to build the order-up dashboard! Passwords and SurveyIDs have been changed to protect the innocent (and our pancake orders).

//----  start code (don't judge us on code style)

function makeapicall($url)
{
		$ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

		$buffer = curl_exec($ch);

		if ($buffer === false) {
			return false;
		}
		curl_close($ch);

 	return unserialize($buffer);

}

if(isset($_GET['orderup']))
{
	$uri = "http://restapi.surveygizmo.com/head/Survey/555555/SurveyResponse/{$_GET['orderup']}.pson?_method=POST&user:pass=hehe@acme.com:12345&data[4]=Yes";
	$results = makecall($uri);

}

//get orders

$uri = "http://restapi.surveygizmo.com/head/Survey/555555/SurveyResponse.pson?user:pass=hehe@acme.com:12345&filter[field][0]=status&filter[operator][0]==&filter[value][0]=Complete&limit=500";

$results = makecall($uri);
$orders = array();
$orderups = array();

foreach($results["data"] as $result)
{
	if($result['status'] != 'Complete')continue;

	if($result["[question(4)]"] == "Yes")
	{
		if($result['id'] == $_GET['orderup'])
		{
			mail($result["[question(2)]"],"Your Pancake Thursday order is ready!","Come and Get it!!!!",null,"-fchristian@sgizmo.com");
		}
		$orderups[] = $result;
	}
	else
	{
		$orders[] = $result;
	}
}

Photo courtesy of Andrew Currie – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Importing Multiple Survey Responses Into a Master Survey

Christian Vanek — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:44:37 +0000

A few weeks ago one of our customers came to us with a very unique problem – which we solved in part by watching Independence Day (I kid you not) and relating it to survey software.

(Stick with me, it does make sense.)

This customer is an event company who runs surveys for each one of their events. Their events are all run by different groups and each group does not have access to the other groups’ data – but the customer still needs to run reports on all of the data combined.

While this is an event company running surveys, it occurred to us that many other organizations likely have similar needs for both master survey reporting and individual event survey reporting.

The nice thing about SurveyGizmo is that as survey software (which always seems to be used for a general purpose tool), we are very adaptable. We talked with our customer for a little while about their needs and came up with the idea of a “mother ship” survey.

If you have seen the movie Independence Day, you’ll remember that a single mother ship came to earth and launched a series of “smaller” (they were still city-sized) ships that began to take over the earth. The trick to defeating these ships was using a “signal” that tied them back to the original mothership.

Now don’t get me started on how ridiculous the entire movie was…but the idea of a huge mother ship that was tethered through a communication lines to smaller ships gave me an idea. (This is the way my mind works – seriously.)

What we did for this customer was to create a generalized master survey (the Mothership) that could be copied for any event. A really simple custom script (shown below) that’s part of that mothership survey ties all of those copies back to the original. So any data they collect is also collected in the master survey – automatically, in real time. Pretty cool, huh?

The nice thing about this solution is it’s simple and versatile. The individual event surveys can be changed as needed – rebranded, new questions added, irrelevant questions disabled – but they still transmit any relevant data back to the master survey for grouped reporting.

We even got fancy and added hidden fields that identify which survey is which in the master survey reporting.

Finally, thanks to the enterprise settings in our software, each event team only has access to the individual event surveys that they should have access to. So security and privacy are maintained across the organization.

If anyone else out there has similar problems that need to be solved, keep in mind this solution.

Here’s a sample of the basic custom script if you’re curious:

//---start code

//Just build a really simple array of question ids/values to transfer to the master survey.
// A loop would be easier, but this is long hand for effect.

%%datatotransfer = array();
%%datatotransfer["4"] = sgapiGetValue(4);
%%datatotransfer["2"] = sgapiGetValue(2);

//Then using sgapiListAdd (which creates a response in another survey and pass in the data!  Easy!!)
// 555555 would be the ID to the master survey.

sgapiListAdd(555555,%%datatotransfer);

//--end code

Manage your Online Surveys From your Mobile Device

Julie Jensen — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:04:16 +0000

Being away from your computer doesn’t mean you can’t manage your SurveyGizmo account. No matter where you are, you can check the status of your projects, monitor responses and see summary reports so you can track the success of your survey.

If you’re a SurveyGizmo customer, you can access your account from your phone. Using your mobile device, go to SurveyGizmo.com – you will see the Mobile version of our Home Page – just log in like you normally do. There’s nothing to download or install to get started, and it works on any mobile device with a web browser, such as a phone, iPad or other tablet.

From your web-enabled mobile device, you can manage your projects:

Access your overview page and manage surveys
Preview and Launch surveys
See number of responses
Review individual responses and sort responses
View “Data at a Glance” reports with pie & bar charts
Close your survey

We have optimized this view of of the SurveyGizmo survey building tool for mobile browsers. When you’re out of the office you can still get realtime updates on your surveys. Grab your phone and try it out now!

SPSS Expert, Joe Glines, on Recording States into Regions with SPSS

Joe Glines - A Survey Expert — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:21:49 +0000

Often when conducting surveys, you would like to slice your data in regards to specific territories/regions. This can be achieved manually sorting your data and creating groups however; syntax can speed up the process and be reused over and over.

In the example below I’m recoding the State variable provided by SurveyGizmo. (Incidentally, SurveyGizmo is the only provider I’ve found that automatically offers this service and I find it incredibly valuable.)

The first thing I do is recode the string state variable into a numeric variable entitled Region. I’ve put each region on it’s own line. This code is easily adapted to your needs.

Recode State

(“CA”=1)(“OR”=1)(“WA”=1)

(“AZ”=2)(“CO”=2)(“ID”=2)(“NM”=2)(“NV”=2)(“TX”=2)(“UT”=2)

(“AL”=3)(“AR”=3)(“IA”=3)(“IL”=3)(“KS”=3)(“LA”=3)(“MN”=3)(“MO”=3)(“MS”=3)(“OK”=3)(“TN”=3)(“WI”=3)

(“FL”=4)(“GA”=4)(“NC”=4)(“SC”=4)

(“IN”=5)(“KY”=5)(“MI”=5)(“OH”=5)(“PA”=5)(“VA”=5)(“WV”=5)

(“CT”=6)(“DC”=6)(“DE”=6)(“MA”=6)(“MD”=6)(“ME”=6)(“NH”=6)(“NJ”=6)(“NY”=6)(“RI”=6)(“VT”=6)

(“MT”=7)(“ND”=7)(“SD”=7)(“WY”=7)(“NE”=7)

(“AK”=9)(“HI”=9) into Region.

Now I’m labeling the variable and adding value labels.

Var label Region “Region” .

Val labels Region 1″Pacific” 2″Southwest” 3″Central” 4″Southeast” 5″Great Lakes” 6″Northeast” 7″Midwest” 9″Outside”.

Since my client doesn’t operate in Alaska or Hawaii, I’m defining both of their values as system missing. This will prevent me from having to filter them out when I run frequencies.

Missing values region (9).

EXE.

After running/executing you’ll have a new Region variable which groups states as you want them.

While we’re on the subject of States & regions, I’ve yet to find a client that didn’t LOVE seeing their results, respondents, etc. in a map. Below I’ve included three maps created from my study. The first map shows the Latitude & Longitude of each respondent. The second map shows respondent count by state and the third one presents count by previously created region

New Feature: Creating Multiple Themes for a Survey

Brittany Heidtke — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:08:29 +0000

On Monday we did a large rollout that included numerous new features and improvements, including the ability to set different themes for a single survey. This is one of the most requested survey features, and you’ll now be able to use it.

Why would you want to use this feature?

There are a variety of ways and reasons you would want to use this, but the main one being that you want to use the same survey in numerous places but want to report on all the data in one place.

An example of this would be if you had a survey you wanted to send out to all your mobile phone users, embed on your website, and send out via a link in an email newsletter. More than likely, you would want to use a separate theme for each one of the ways you’re sending out your survey because each one has a unique format.

The mobile phone link would require a mobile phone theme in order for it to show up properly on a smart phone, the website embed would require the embed theme in order to integrate with your site the best, and the link on the email newsletter would need to be formatted in a completely different way because users will be taking the survey in separate webpage.

With the new functionality of having multiple themes for one survey, you can now easily do this.

How do you add multiple themes for one survey?

In adding this new functionality, we needed to move a few things around withing the Look & Feel and the Publish interface, so you’ll notice a couple of new links and ways to go get to the new feature.

First, you’ll want to set up your default theme, which in the example above would be the theme you’re using for the email newsletter link.

You do this the same way you normally set up a theme. Head over to the Look & Feel link and click the customize link (as Shown below).

Once you’re done formatting that, you’ll want to head over to the Publish tab to create the other links you’ll be sending out. We’ll start out by creating a link for the mobile phone surveys.

Create a weblink like you normally would, and go into the link’s editing options (these will automatically pop-up when you click to create the link). Click on the Themes tab on the right hand side. Then Select “Yes” in the second section where it says “Override Default Mobile”. This gives you the ability to select which mobile theme you want your users to see your survey in. (See the image below)

Next, we’ll set up the embeddable survey. Create another weblink like you did before. Click on the Themes tab on the left hand side and then select “Yes” under Theme Settings for this Link/Campaign.

Scroll until you find the Embeddable theme and select that. (Shown in the image below)

If you want to go in and edit the theme to change colors or turn off page titles, etc, all you have to do is hover over the link that you want to change and click on the multiple colored square that appears in the right hand side. (Show in the the image below)

This will put you into the theme editor, and you’ll be able to change anything that you need.

Now each one of your links has specific formatting. We hope you enjoy this feature, and if you have any questions, please let us know!

Tip of the Week: The Question Randomizer

Brittany Heidtke — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:11:08 +0000

Have you ever worried that your survey is too long but you know all the questions you have are important and you need to get answers for all of them? But how can you do this?
It’s actually pretty simple!

As long as you have a large enough sample size, you can use our Question Randomizer to only show a certain amount of random questions per page.

Let’s say you have 20 questions you want answers to, but believe that your sample base (the people who will be taking your survey) will only want to answer 10 questions. All you need to do is set the Question Randomizer to show 10 random questions on your page and you won’t fatigue your respondents (increasing your overall response rate) and you’ll still receive responses to all the questions. An overall win/win.

So how do you set this up?

It’s actually pretty simple. Just click on the Edit Page Options link, then click on the Advanced tab. Fill in the number of questions you want shown on the page at one time (see screen shot below.) And that’s it!

SurveyGizmo will now show pick 10 questions at random to show on that page.

As always, we’d love to hear how you’re using this feature! Let us know by telling us in the comments below.

Bonus tip – This is great when you’re creating a quiz in a class-room format and only need your students to take 10 questions, but you have a pool of 50 different questions to choose from. It will make every student’s test a little unique and as along as you use the quiz action, grading the tests will be a breeze!

Tip of the week: Using an “Other (Please Specify)” Answer Option

Brittany Heidtke — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:17:21 +0000

You’ve most likely seen these on surveys before, the ability to fill in a blank text field in a multiple choice question after the words “Other”. They’re easy to set up within SurveyGizmo and can be done in just a few quick steps.

But, why would you use the Other textbox?

The Other textbox is great if you think people will have other ideas besides the answer options that you give in a multiple choice or single select question.

It’s also a rather handy option when you’re putting together multiple choice questions – we even used it when we sent out a survey to all our employees asking them to vote for a hypothetical keg for a hypothetical party we would have some day. You can check out the survey over here – http://demo.other-text-box.sgizmo.com/s3/ (if you’re ever in Boulder and would like to stop by and have a hypothetical beer, just drop us a line in the comments and we’ll be more than happy to have you over!)

How do you set it up?

Now that you know why you’d want to use the “Other (Please Specify)” textbox, it’s time to figure out how to set it up in your survey.

First, you’ll want to use one of the question types that allow you to do this which are Radio button questions or Checkbox (multiple choice) questions.

Next, add your question and answers and be sure to include “Other” as one of your answer options.

Then you’ll need to go in and edit the question you just added and click on the little pencil icon next to the “Other” answer option you typed in. Click on “Edit Properties” and under the Special Settings drop-down menu select “Other”. And that’s all there is to it!

To get even greater detail as to how to set up the Other Textbox options, head over to the step-by-step tutorial with some stellar screenshots.

As always, we’d love to hear the unique ways you’re using the Other Textbox in your surveys. If you have a unique use, please leave it in the comments – we’d love to share it with everyone!

Question of the Week: “How do I let survey takers decide which language they want to take my survey in?”

Brittany Heidtke — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:46:28 +0000

How do you let your survey takers decide which language to take your survey in?

This is a fantastic question! We’ve been touting that we’re multi-lingual capable for awhile now, but how exactly do you create surveys in multiple languages and then let your survey takers take the surveys in their native language?

First, you’ll need an Enterprise level account. Then you’ll need to create your original survey, just like you normally would. Once you have all your questions set and ready to go, you’ll want to start adding the different versions of the survey in the various languages.

To do this, head over to the Text/Translations link and click on the Add a Language Button (Shown Below)

Select the first language you want to translate your survey to. Start typing out the survey in that language and when you’re done, remember to press save. Continue doing this until you have all the languages you want your users to choose from.

Now you’re almost all done! Next you need to give your survey takers the ability to pick which language they want to take your survey in on the first page of the survey.

This get’s a little tricky (but shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes! So don’t worry.) That’s why our fabulous tutorial team has put together a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this (with great screen shots!)

Check out the Selecting Your Display Language tutorial and your survey is all set. It’s as simple as that!

Tweet Your Survey – Yes, You Can Do That!

Brittany Heidtke — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:29:46 +0000

For the past year or so, social media has been all the buzz. Whether you’ve been connecting with your friends and family using Facebook, recommending professional connections via LinkedIn, or telling your thoughts via Twitter, you more than likely have used social media in some way, shape, or form.

Now the feature that I want to re-introduce to you is an oldie but a goodie and incorporates all that good social media quick turn around and globalization we’ve all become accustomed to lately — sending your survey out to all your Twitter followers to take.

We’ve had the ability to post a survey to Twitter for a little over a year, but I bet a lot of you didn’t even know you were able to do it – or when it did come out, you didn’t use Twitter as much as you do today!

So let’s go through a quick run-down of how to post a survey to Twitter:

First head over to your Account Settings and click on the API Tab and enter in your login credentials for Twitter. This is so all you have to do is push a button when you publish your survey and it will automatically post to your Twitter page – how cool is that? You can check out where to add your twitter credentials below.

Once you do that, all you need to do next is create the survey you want your Twitter followers to take via your Twitter stream. After you’re done creating your survey, head over to the Publish tab and click on the the little Twitter Icon.

You’ll pull up a window that looks like the one below. Write out the message you want your Twitter followers to see and we’ll automatically append your link to the end of your Tweet! You can see an example of the Twitter publish page below:

That’s all there is to it! If you have any questions about posting to Twitter, let us know!