For those of you who don’t use it, think of it like this: Evernote is a digital notebook that lives in the cloud. You can use it to store a huge number of different types of data, from notes to images to (in our case) survey results.

Anything you upload to Evernote is automatically synced across all your devices. If you upload it on your PC, it’s immediately available on your iPhone, on your Mac (at home), and anywhere via the Evernote website. Add to this the fact that you can share notebooks in Evernote with other people, and you have a pretty powerful collaboration tool on your hands.

Exporting Survey Results to Evernote

So why does it make sense to use a program like Evernote with our survey software? Mostly, because it’s a convenient place to store your info.

Let’s say you want to embed a form on your website to collect feedback for an event. And you want the info to be in your team’s hands as soon as it comes in. You could normally run a report, but that wouldn’t distribute all the results to your team in an easily-searchable format. In this case, a solution like exporting survey results to Evernote could be a good option.

Why not just email my survey results to myself?

It’s definitely easy to email survey results to yourself and your colleagues using SurveyGizmo. But as we all know, emails can often get lost in the shuffle of day-to-day operations. If you export survey results to Evernote, however, you wind up having them all in one, organized location, immediately accessible by all your team.

How do I export survey results to Evernote?

Every Evernote account includes an email address, that allows you to easily create new notes in your Evernote account. By leveraging this with SurveyGizmo’s automatic email actions, you can easily import your survey results.

All you need to do is:

1. Locate your Evernote email address.
2. Create a new SurveyGimo email action to automatically email survey results as soon as a survey is completed.
3. Use the Evernote email address as the to: address.

To better organize your survey results, you can tell Evernote which folder to put your results into by including it in the subject line (see this tutorial for more info). Once your results have been imported into Evernote, you can easily merge them into a single note for easier scanning and review.

That’s it! We’ll be adding a more detailed tutorial to the site shortly, and will update this blog when it’s available.

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)

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog.

Let’s be honest. The Market Research Event was about learning and professional development – but it was also a lot of fun! Networking Happy Hours, a trip to Epcot, fun market research colleagues, and don’t forget the swag! Oh man, there was a lot of fun swag. We saw candy, calculators, chances to win ipads, and more pens than you can shake a stick at. Just for fun I’m going to share with you some of my favorites!

Of course I have to give a callout to the companies who provided cocktails Tuesday night – you can’t go wrong with fancy mixed drinks. Youthbeat, a youth market research organization, gave out slinkys (slinkies? What is the plural of that word, anyway?), which I had no end of fun with – although I’m not sure the hotel staff appreciated my using their stairs for slinky fun. Clarabridge, who offers text analytics software to manage text-based customer and market research data, gave out these really nifty ice cubes. You freeze them, and they’ll chill your drinks, but they also light up and flash!

Next, CIG, a full-service market research agency, had what I thought was the coolest t-shirt of the convention – and they were super nice to boot! They also had loads of granola bars, snacks, and candy to keep one’s energy up.

GfK Group had these really neat water bottles that lay flat when empty but stand when filled. In Boulder everyone is constantly carrying around water bottles, so this bit of swag strikes me as particularly useful.

I also have to take a moment to give an extra special shout out for the girls at Luminosity Marketing. They were really nice, interesting, and giving out tiny bottles of Absolut Vodka. If you’re looking to do some market research or strategic planning you should give these guys a call, they’re really knowledgeable and friendly.

But the absolute coolest swag in my opinion? Flying, screaming, monkey slingshots! Allegiance is a company that specializes in helping you understand the voice of your customers and employees. We had a lot to chat about surrounding online survey software and data collection, and I really enjoyed talking with them. They even gave me two of their limited supply flying sling-shot monkeys which I can now use to torment my cats and the SurveyGizmo’s developers. Gotta love those super annoying noisemaking toys.

What’s the best swag you’ve ever gotten?

The Review Response action let’s you add one action to your survey that shows your survey taker all of the answers and questions that they previously had picked.

Basically, it allows them to review their answers before they submit their survey over to you. A bonus feature to this action is that you can also enable the action to allow them to save a PDF of their answers for their files.

This action is great for:

• Quiz & Test taking
• Job Application Forms
• Long surveys
• Just to name a few…

To learn how to use this action, you’ll want to head over to the Review Response Action Tutorial. We’d love to hear about the different ways you use the Review Response Action. Please feel free to let us know in the comments section below.

You’ve probably all heard of Flickr by now, but just in case you haven’t Flickr is an online photo management system where you can upload your photos and share them with your friends.

Flickr is not only a great place to store your pictures (check out all the pictures we have on the SurveyGizmo stream over here) but it’s a great place to look for free pictures to use for things like your surveys, website, blog, or newsletter.

So let’s say you’re creating a survey where you need a couple of images for your image choice question, but don’t want to pay for an image from another site. Just head over to Flickr and put what you’re looking for in the search box.

This next part is where you want to be careful though. You’ll want to go into the advanced search and scroll down until you see the checkbox for only seeing photos with the Creative Commons license attached to them. Here’s a quick link for searching JUST creative commons: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

There are different levels of Creative Commons images, but what it basically means is that people are putting their images out there for you to use as long as you give them credit for the taking the photo.

How do you give them credit for the photo?

The easiest way is to just grab the HTML code that they give under the Share This tab and embed the image directly into your survey. This already has the attribute code, as well as the link back to the original image directly inside of it. That way you don’t have to worry about it. You can see how do that in the image below:

If you would rather save the picture to your desktop and upload it to SurveyGizmo directly, then there will be a few more steps you’ll need to take.

First, click on the image and you’ll be shown the picture with a black box around it. Next, you’re going to want to click on the little building block icon in the upper right-hand corner that says View All Sizes.
From there, Flickr will take you to a screen where you can download any size of the image that you want.

Now that you have the image downloaded to your desktop, you can now upload it to your SurveyGizmo library for easy use in your image choice questions.

After you use the image, you’ll need to attribute the picture back to where you found it (this is important so that everyone gets the credit that they deserve).

To do this, just add some descriptive text somewhere underneath your question, letting your survey takers know the link where you got the image from as well as the name of the Flickr photographer and you should be good to go.

It’s as easy as that. Flickr has 10′s of thousands of pictures at your disposal – I always find that when it comes to Flickr, the hardest part is narrowing down all my choices because there are just so many great images to choose from.

Happy Flickr-ing!

Big tip of the hat to Mario for putting this together! We all love this quick video and hope you do too.

Hey Chris! You’re our SurveyGizmo Spotlight this week. Do you have some time for a quick interview?

Yeah, sure. Can we do it out in the support area though, it’s only Tess and me right now because Pharlain’s training the 3 new hires.

Yep, not a problem. OK. Let’s start off with — How did you make your way to SurveyGizmo?

I actually am originally from Oklahoma.

Why did you move?

Have you ever been to Oklahoma?

Point taken. Well, why did you choose Colorado?

I had a couple of friends who lived here that I met while I studied in Japan during college. I also wanted to go to Grad School here.

Ohh Grad School. What do you want to go for?

History and Archeology. I eventually want to get my PhD and become a professor for half the year and then spend the other half the year in China and Japan.

You seem big into the Asian culture. How did that start?

It actually all started when I was 9. My parents took me to Disney World and one of the days we went to Epcot. My parents actually thought they had lost me for a couple of hours because I had found the Japan section and stayed there completely fascinated by everything it had.

So Disney started your love affair with Japan, nice. So in college you were able to study in Japan for a year, what do you think was the coolest thing you got to experience when you were there?

Hmmm….It’s a tie. The food was amazing. There was a thing called tonkatsu, that is very similar to a fried pork chop, that is the most amazing food in the entire world.

And then the other coolest thing has to be the history. I know everyone says this, but it was amazing to see the a giant, brand-new skyscraper next to a 500 year old temple. It was beautiful.

I’m sure that was amazing. What do you think was the weirdest thing you experienced?

Oh god there was a lot of strange things! But I’d have to say the strangest was that there was a restaurant that would let you eat a live octopus. They were little. I never did it, but I had a friend who did it. He said one time was enough for him.

Oh gross! I could never do that. Way too squishy. Now that I have that nice mental image in my head, let’s change the subject. So, SurveyGizmo – what is it that you do?

I’m part of the support team. So I assist people with any questions or problems they might have with SurveyGizmo. I work with the development team to get to the bottom of issues and help them solve problems.

All your guys do a great a job! So when you’re not slashing customers’ issues, what do you outside of work?

I’m stupidly obsessed with cars. I love motorcycles. I race go-karts. Basically I just like going fast. I also like super nerdy things like D&D and science fiction shows and movies.

What’s your favorite movie?

Hmmm…. V for Vendetta. That movie was great.

Never seen it. I’ll have to check it out sometime. If you I were to give you a million dollars right now what would you do with it?

No strings attached? Just free?

No strings attached. Completely free. No taxes. Just go.

1. I would pay off my condo. 2. I would put a ton of it in savings so that I could manipulate it so I could just live off the interest forever. 3. I would buy a workshop to play with cars. I’d have all the tools I needed to work on everything. 4. I’d keep coming into SurveyGizmo for fun.

Nice answer. I feel like you’ve thought about this before. So you said you would keep coming into work. What do you think is your favorite part of SurveyGizmo?

Do I just have to choose one thing?

Um, you can do a top 3 list.

OK. 1. Nerf weapons. 2. Keggerator 3. The general awesomeness of everyone here. Everyone is working hard not only for the customers but for each other. There’s an amazing sense of teamwork at this place.

I completely agree! Well Chris that wraps things up. Thank you for letting me interview you today. I really appreciate it.

That’s it for this week. Keep your eyes peeled for next week’s SurveyGizmo Spotlight!

]]> http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/chris-mccown/feed/ 0 http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/meals-on-wheels-festival-of-trees-a-huge-success/ http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/meals-on-wheels-festival-of-trees-a-huge-success/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:36:44 +0000 Brittany Heidtke http://www.surveygizmo.com/?p=26486 Read More »]]> For the second year running, the SurveyGizmo team attended the Boulder Meals on Wheels annual Festival of Trees raffle and silent auction. This year we donated a tree with the theme “Silent Night: It’s okay to be a little selfish sometimes” We adorned the tree with all the things you’d want for a perfect night at home including a Kindle, puzzles, fuzzy blankets and pillows, an espresso maker and coffee.

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.

Hey Alan! Can I interview you for the SurveyGizmo Spotlight this week?

Sure, do you want me to sign autographs too?

Ha! Very funny…OK let’s start off with, what is it that you do at SurveyGizmo?

Well my business card says “Support Emcee”, but that was before I moved into the job that I have today. I’m thinking my title is probably Support Dev Anchor. You’re Marketing, you decide what my title is!

How about Support Dev Go-Between Gopher??? I like that one! But back to my original question, what is it that you do every day?

Well, I act as the liaison/mediator/translator/filter between support and development. Basically any of the bugs that are found by support or our customers, I try to replicate. If I’m able to replicate them, then I put them into our bug tracking system and our Development team fixes them.

I’m glad we have you here! So when you’re not being the a bug reporting machine, please tell the readers what you like to do outside of work?

Soccer practice, soccer games, playing soccer, watching soccer, occasionally playing video games, more soccer, and more soccer.

Wow that’s a lot of soccer! Do you coach? Who’s your favorite team? How many teams are you on? When did your love affair with soccer start?

I did coach — you know this already because you helped out with the team!

I know but the lovely readers don’t know. Continue with the answers please….

Well the team I coached was a U-13 boys team. I liked to call them the Bad News Bears — they were terribly hilarious. It was a ton of fun but currently I’m on 2 teams, so I had to retire from coaching for a little bit.

The “love affair” as you put it, probably started when I started playing soccer in Kindergarten. So what’s that — 20 years or something?

May favorite team is Manchester United – The Best Team in the World!

Have you ever gotten to see them play?

No, but I did get to watch a match again Fulham and Sunderland when I was in London a couple of years back. Some day though I hope to.

So, if I were to give you a million dollars right now, what would you do with it?

I would probably go over to England and watch soccer matches for a month. I’d definitely have to watch Manchester United play a ton. Then maybe just hop around Europe for a bit. That sounds like a great trip!

That does sound fun! I want to watch Manchester United play! Can I come too?

No.

Ha! Thanks. OK time for my final question – what is your favorite part of SurveyGizmo?

Hmmmm…. my favorite part has to be the relaxedness (I think I just coined a new word there.) I really like the non-corporate feel and that everyone is working towards one goal.

I like that too! Well Alan, that’s a wrap on this interview. Thanks for letting me interview you. I’m sure all our customers will be asking for autographs now!

That’s all for this week’s SurveyGizmo Spotlight. If you would like an autograph from Alan, just leave a comment and we’ll send you one!

Hey Andrew, turn around so I can interview you please.

Two minutes, just have to finish something up.

OK I’m good. Let’s do this.

So, what did you do before you came to SurveyGizmo?

I actually worked down the street at another small start-up in Boulder. I was the only designer there so I got to do a lot of things like the front-end design of the website and marketing projects. Before that, I was in school at CSU up in Fort Collins. I graduated with a degree in Graphic Design. And before that, well, I grew up in Colorado so I’ve been here for awhile.

Well I’m glad you moseyed down the street and have been here for over a year now! Speaking of which, can you tell the lovely readers what you do day-to-day?

Ummm…. marketing, marketing, marketing, more marketing. Really, I spend most of the day in PhotoShop creating things then the rest of the time inside of the code trying to make them actually work.

Not a bad gig if I do say so myself. So when you’re not spending your time with ALL the marketing stuff, what do you do? What do you do for fun?

I like reading…

What are you reading right now? Who’s your favorite author?

Geez a million questions! My favorite author is Charles Stross, but right now I’m reading a fiction book called Leaf House. It’s really good. It’s about this apprentice at a tattoo shop that is annotating a book he found in his dead neighbor’s house that the dead neighbor was writing. And that book is about a movie about a house that is bigger on the inside than it is is on the outside.

Wow! I’m trying to wrap my head around that one.

It’s really good. You need to read it.

Its sounds good. I’ll have to check it out. What else do you do outside of work?

Well I like to play board games, video games, hang out with my cat (Dr. Patrick Fibonacci Feynman Waffles III but we call him “The Bear”), oh and ride my bike. I fully intend on riding my bike to work all winter long.

But what about when it snows?

Snow biking is the best!

OK…. you’re crazy! Oh and one final question – if I gave you a million dollars right now, what would you do with it?

I would go traveling. I think I would go back to my two favorite places, Switzerland and Vancouver BC. The picture you have of me is actually me traveling in Germany (I’m right in front of the Reichstag building.) After college I took 3 months off and backpacked across Europe with my future wife, Colette.

Wouldn’t you want to go anywhere warm?

I apparently like the mountains. I really don’t like the heat. I think the hottest place I’ve ever stayed was Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Well count me in for any of your trips! Thank you, Andrew for letting me interview you. Best Marketing Designer at SurveyGizmo (yes… I know you’re the only one, but still!)