Over the past few years, technology has really shaken up the polling world. It started with the revelation that more than 1 in 4 Americans have given up their land line in favor of mobile phones. In response, Rasmussen Reports (who pioneered the use of automated phone polling techniques) adjusted their polling methods to include both phone polling and online surveys to reach those who have abandoned traditional land lines. Other polling services adopted similar techniques.

And that’s just one of the many ways technology is affecting the polling landscape. So we asked ourselves – how can technology make the political data collection world more efficient? Here are a few ways we came up with:

iPad Surveys & Exit Polls

One way to make political polls more efficient is to simply change the method you use to collect data. The iPad has had a huge impact on the world of mobile surveys – it only makes sense that it could improve exit polling as well.

Currently, most exit polls are conducted via pen and paper, which has worked well for years. Interviewers phone in results three times a day, and note the demographic data of the voters who refuse to participate.

Today, by using an iPad survey app in place of pen and paper, you can quickly and easily record data to a server. Real-time data updates allow polling organizations to see what’s happening in the moment, rather than waiting on their polling staff to report in 3 times per day. Just set up an iPad with a quick kiosk survey, and you’re on your way.

But what about the demographic component that pollsters report? Again, there’s an answer in the form of an iPad survey. By keeping a tally on an iPad or iPhone (using a tool like our Gesture Tally question type), pollsters can easily keep track of different characteristics of the people polled (or not polled, for that matter).

Using iPad Surveys to Collect Digital Petitions

Additionally, ballot initiatives across the U.S. are on the rise…and in order to get on the ballot, you need petition signatures. Collecting signatures by hand requires careful validation of each signature, as well as the name and address of the signee (which is a tedious task – something that most petition collectors are all-too-aware of). So why not make your petition collection digital?

With an iPad, a SurveyGizmo survey, and SurveyGizmo’s awesome Signature Capture question type, organizations can collect signatures from people on the street. Respondents can either sign the iPad using their fingers, or you can offer an iPad Stylus (if your respondents feel more comfortable signing with that).

By using an iPad survey and an online survey tool to collect petition signatures, organizations gain tremendous efficiency. All responses will be automatically synced to the server, and can then be quickly scanned to remove duplicates. This streamlines the process, yields better data, and makes everybody’s job a lot easier.

As the election season progresses, technology will continue to affect polling and data collection in numerous other ways. From computerized voting to polling, what other ways can you see technology changing the political landscape in 2012?

Image courtesy of Denise Cross – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Every year for the holidays, we do a lot of giving. This year it all started with Movember. Joshua Robitaille organized a group of SurveyGizmo employees to grow moustaches over the month of November to raise money for prostate cancer research. They raised close to $400, and are already making plans to go bigger (and, uh, creepier) next year. (Side note – if you’d still like to donate, you can do so here).

We also organized a food drive for Thanksgiving, with departments competing to bring in the most food. The winning department (Sales) received a gourmet grilled cheese lunch donated and cooked by our Strategic Alliance manager, Gerald Rhodes (who studied who studied les Arts Culinaires du Fromage Grillé at the Collège de Sorbonne in Paris*).

Then during the month of December, we adopted 4 local families in need and bought gifts for them. Not bad for a company with 49 employees! Taylor Morgan, our Survey Support Mermaid (yes, that’s her official title), spearheaded the effort. We were able to get something for everyone on the list, and even got something for those family members who hadn’t asked to receive any gifts! We finished the whole project off with a big wrapping party – here are a few of the photos:

**See the rest of the photos on our SurveyGizmo Flickr page.

Overall, it’s been a great holiday season here at SurveyGizmo. We thank you all for your support, and wish you the warmest and happiest of holidays! (Also – if you’re a customer, we may have sent you something that’ll arrive soon. So you might keep an eye out. Just sayin’.)

Happy surveying!

*Okay, not really. But he does make a mean grilled cheese.

There are two different Ruby gems out there right now to choose from:

survey-gizmo-ruby Ruby Gem

Kabari Hendrick released this Ruby gem to integrate Ruby with the SurveyGizmo API v.1 using an ActiveModel style interface. It interfaces with survey API resources such as surveys, questions, pages, options, and responses. It also supports all of the actions provided by the API: get, create, update, delete, and get list. There is also error handling.

You can follow these links to check out the survey-gizmo-ruby repository, see an extended usage example, or read the documentation.

Kabari’s company, Lab42, uses it in a few different places, such as this survey tool.

surveygizmo Ruby Gem

Bobby Uhlenbrock with Ample built this Ruby Gem, which currently focuses heavily on pulling response data from the SurveyGizmo API.

Bobby told us, “My goal was to make this as easy to drop into an app as the Twitter gem. Therefore, if you’ve ever used the Twitter gem, this should make immediate sense.”

You can follow the links below to see the surveygizmo Ruby Gem repository, as well as check out the documentation.

**We’ve also added both of these gems to our Survey API Resources page to make them easy to find in the future.

What’s Next

Both developers told us that their gems weren’t yet finished, and could use some help in the form of contributors, bug-finders, etc…so if you’re a Ruby developer who wants to make it easy to integrate your apps with SurveyGizmo, go get involved!

We love it when people build cool things with our API – thanks to Bobby and Kabari for getting these started! If you’ve used these Ruby gems (or the SurveyGizmo API) to build something great, please drop us an email and let us know! We’d love to talk to you more about it.

But as anyone who’s ever worked in the email world knows, actually getting to the inbox is always a concern. How can you make sure your email invites aren’t going to be routed into the dreaded spam folder?

While we previously outlined some survey email invitation best practices, today we want to talk about a few tools we use to help your survey invitations avoid the spam filter.

SurveyGizmo’s Spam Score Tool

To help with deliverability, SurveyGizmo offers a built-in Spam Score tool that will look for key spam indicators within your email invitation content. Every time you create a new email campaign by clicking the “Email Campaign” campaign button and entering your body copy, your Spam Score will show up on the Campaign Info screen.

We can’t stress this enough: Pay close attention to the recommendations of this tool!!

Our Spam Score tool uses the same algorithms as the most widely-used enterprise spam filtering programs, so it gives a very good indication of whether or not your survey invitations will make it to the inboxes of your respondents. If your email scores high, changes are it’s going to get filtered.

You can click on your Spam Score in the Campaign Info screen to get an idea of which parts of your email are tripping the filters, then revise your email invitation and send away.

Message Pre-Approval

The first few times you send a survey invitation via email, we require that your message be validated by a live person at SurveyGizmo. While this may seem inconvenient, we have good reason for it: it risks the deliverability of all of our customers if one customer uses our survey software to send a spam email campaign.

We validate survey invitations within two business days – but it usually take a lot less time! And if you need to send your invitation immediately, you can let us know and we’ll fast-track it.

By validating email invitations, we’re able to ensure that we offer the highest level of deliverability to our customers. But what if one of our previously-validated customers suddenly starts sending spam email? That’s where the third line of defense comes in…

Email Feedback Loops

In addition to our spam score tool and email validation process, SurveyGizmo subscribes to feedback loops from all of the major internet and email service providers. If any of their customers mark an email as spam, we hear about it and take appropriate action.

Now, this doesn’t mean we’re going to necessarily cut off a customer for getting a single spam complaint. In this day and age, a lot of people hit the ‘Spam’ button on their web-based email account rather than hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ link. But if we receive a considerable number of complaints about a certain campaign, we’re going to look further into it. And if we find someone is abusing our email system, we’ll put an end to it.

As we continue to grow, we continue to revise our spam-fighting techniques – from front-end changes like the spam score system to backend changes on the server side. By keeping one step ahead of the game, we make sure that all our users can continue to effectively send survey invitations via email. And that being said, it’s largely because of you (our customers) that we’re in the position that we’re in. Thanks for helping to keep our system spam-free!

Image courtesy of Dani Armengol Garreta – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Otherwise, feel free to read on!

Last week I attended the 2011 The Market Research Event (TMRE) conference, which bills itself as the most comprehensive conference in the world for improving business insights through market research. With 1,200 market researchers attending 9 tracks of break-out sessions and multiple Keynote events each day, the event didn’t disappoint!

The event was filled with great market research information – here are a few of my top takeaways:

Lighten Up On the Options

Your customers say they want more choices…but your customer satisfaction research indicates otherwise? This scenario is not at all uncommon.

At The Market Research Event, Sheena Iyengar (author of The Art of Choosing) led a session discussing the difficulty of choices. According to Sheena’s research, while customers regularly say they want more choice, they more often are unhappy when they have to choose from the extra choices.

The solution? When deciding what to offer customers, Sheena recommends providing three distinct categories with three distinguishable choices in each category. By striving for a happy medium, you offer enough choices to allow the customer to feel control, but not enough to overwhelm them (this technique works well for survey design, too!).

Screen Your Survey Respondents

Ever have the experience where you find yourself getting far too many flat-liners on your survey? If you’re offering an incentive, these flat-liners might be responding simply to take advantage of your offer.

Try adding a few low-incidence screener questions to your survey to help you screen out the professional survey takers and clean your data.

Appeal to Younger Survey Audiences

Sometimes, the survey medium can be prohibitive. Particularly when dealing with younger audiences, who are often too young to respond to traditional survey methodologies. At the same time, their feedback is still incredibly valuable as a target market. So how to reach them?

Try turning your survey into a game to make it a more engaging experience. By making your survey more interactive and allowing younger audiences to offer feedback in a more fun way (drawing, for instance), younger respondents will be more likely to give genuine, honest answers about their feelings and ideas.

Which brings us to the next takeaway…

Provide Positive Reinforcement

Are monetary incentives not an option for a survey? Try providing positive reinforcement through instant survey results data. You’d be surprised at how many survey respondents will keep going through a survey if they receive some sort of confirmation that their responses are making a difference (or if they can compare their answers to the rest of the survey respondents).

By the same token, you can further engage your respondents of all ages by turning your survey into a game (that’s right – it works for adults, too). Gamification was a hot topic at TMRE, and with good reason – it’s been an extremely successful technique recently to boost survey engagement.

Either way, by giving your respondents some sort of positive reinforcement for their survey responses, you can better engage them and increase your survey response rates.

Lastly, from all the TMRE sessions I attended (too many to recount), my key takeaway is profoundly simple:

If what you’re doing with your market research efforts is not giving you the results that you want, try something different.

Seriously. There are endless different market research techniques and philosophies out there to choose from. If what you’re doing isn’t working, attack it from a different angle until you find what works.

TMRE 2011 was a great event – I hope to see some of you there next year!

While we were gone many of the developers and support staff stayed behind to man the ship and they did a great job! They also worked hard on getting the ball rolling on some new features, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for those to roll out in the near future.

We also want to send a huge shout out to everyone who came to our meet-up. We hope that you all liked Garrido’s and if you didn’t have time to get your questions answered, to be sure to ask us in the comments and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Thanks again, Austin, for sharing your city with us. We all had a great time!

• Pete Fredricks – developer
• Anthony Hildoer – developer
• Shawn Kumar – Quality Assurance

As per usual, we sat down for a conversation after a few weeks about SurveyGizmo, and what follows is our introduction to these fine upstanding gentlemen!

What your thoughts about SurveyGizmo in general?
The overall vibe was a bit of a surprise regarding the application. Shawn said he was surprised that the tool was, “more complicated than I expected.” When it came to the company culture, Anthony compared it to the Addam’s family. “On the outside you can’t imagine how it succeeds, but after a little while you get it and it works.” From our unique interviews to extensive training, Pete simply stated that SurveyGizmo is a team.

What was the biggest surprise in your first month?
All three of them agreed that the existence of a SurveyGizmo manual (in printed and bound book format) really cemented the application as a professional tool. Beyond that, Anthony said he was surprised, “How many intelligent people are here. They just get it.” Shawn wasn’t sure if SurveyGizmo would be a professional working atmosphere, but he started coming in each day and realized, “Everyone works hard.”

Anything fun happen to you?
Shawn found the big picture brought him the most joy, just the entire work environment and work ethic made it fun. “I like coming here on a Monday.” Of course, Anthony just loved playing with the dogs that spend the day in the office with their owners. On an unrelated note, the SurveyGizmo rookie and then overall MVP for last quarter, our system adminstrator Ryan, was complimented for knowing more than just his role. “He knows a lot about how everything works and is really approachable,” said Anthony.

What are you looking forward to in the coming days/weeks/months?
As developers, they all wanted to make things not only better, but Pete put it best by saying, “I want to distinguish SurveyGizmo from other tools. People will choose SurveyGizmo because it has everything.” Shawn was focused on improving the tool before it reached our users and without additional strain on development, while Anthony just wanted to get more comfortable with the code.

What about the people here at SurveyGizmo?
This question lead to a very long discussion where they shared their experiences with other members of the staff, especially customer support. Anthony was impressed that everyone understood their needs (reflecting a customer’s needs) and could communicate those effectively. Shawn took it a step further by stating, “Nobody is afraid to admit ignorance. If they don’t know, they ask for help, and others are more than willing to help them without judging them.”

Finally, say something nice about a teammate.
Anthony about Shawn: “Shawn is a very humble personal. There is never an ego trip.”
Pete about Anthony: “I’ve been able to work with Anthony on some projects, and coming from a marketing background that is not backend code, Anthony really knows the way PHP works and that has been a great compliment to my experience.”
Shawn about Pete: “When we first met, I was floored by how smart he was. However, he was also very normal and didn’t have an attitude that would normally accompany someone that smart.”

Well there you have it. There is only one last thing to say: break;

From a graduated MBA student (Hi Tom) to an organization that worked closely with SurveyGizmo in the second year it was created, I packed a lot of Phoenix and Scottsdale into a few hours, with 105 degree heat and humidity that was… unusually high. I got some great feedback about using SurveyGizmo 3.0 and the great content we continue to put out through our SurveyGizmo Twitter account. I also had the privilege of checking out a super eco chair from Bay Cities made entirely of cardboard! They were sent to the Earth911.com offices and had just been put together before I arrived (I’m taking full credit; color me impressed):

A special thanks to Larry and the rest of Earth911 who were fantastic hosts for a few hours before I returned back to Denver that evening. If you haven’t checked out the fantastic editorial content they offer or easy directory for recycling anything, their website should definitely be added to your ‘to-do’ list!

We’re all out and about traveling and love to meet all of our users. In the coming weeks we’ll be in Oahu, Hawaii, and Chicago! The info for both meet-ups (and the RSVPs) are below. We’d love to meet you all! Please if you’re in one of these cities, come out and say hi. They are extremely fun and a great way to meet other SurveyGizmo users as well as a SurveyGizmo-er!

Chicago Meet-up Details – in the City!

Place: Fado Irish Pub – 100 West Grand Avenue, Chicago
2 blocks west on Grand from the Grand Red Line stop and 6 blocks north on Clark from the Clark and Lake El stop.
Date: Monday, December 20th
Time: 6PM – 7PM
Host: SurveyGizmo’s Marketing Maven, Brittany Heidtke (hey that’s me!)

RSVP: http://surveygizmo-marketing.chicago-meet-up.sgizmo.com/s3/

Oahu Meet-up Details

Place: Kona Brewing Company’s Koko Marina Pub – 7192 Kalaniana’ole Highway, Honolulu, Hawaii 96825
Date: Wednesday, January 5th
Time: Lunch: 12PM – 1PM
Host: SurveyGizmo’s Developer, Chad Shinsato

RSVP: http://surveygizmo-marketing.oahu-meet-up.sgizmo.com/s3/

The Kindle was a big hit and a ton of people were hoping to win our tree (yes, I may have put a raffle ticket into our own tree — who wouldn’t want to win a Kindle??) Well I didn’t win our tree, one of the girls from the Sterling Group in Boulder did, but we did have some tree winners in our group. Christian and Mario both won trees this year!

The rest of us were able to donate money to a great organization (Meals on Wheels) that we all believe in. On top of the Festival of Trees event that we’ve gone to for the last two years, we also have a Meals on Wheels route we drive every Friday.

We love Meals on Wheels of Boulder and if you ever get a chance to volunteer for them, please do. There are local chapters all over the country that really help people out in their time of need.

If you already help out your local chapter of Meals on Wheels, we’d love to hear about it! Leave some comment love.