It’s a rare rainy day in Boulder, CO which reminds me of one of my favorite psychology experiments. Back in 1983 Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore published a study examining how mood relates to more global evaluations of general well-being. Essentially these researchers wanted to know if being in a good mood leads people to [...]

Be sure to add a comment below about your own experience with incentives, and be entered to win some fresh Kona coffee!
In my last post (Increasing Response Rates: Part I), I talked about increasing your survey response rates. I suggested that you:

Tell your respondents you will share the results with them.
Identify allies who will urge [...]

I was asked the following question recently, “From a statistical standpoint, how do you see three ‘No’s’ votes out of a possible 23 board members. Can you find out specifically what the error would be?”
This brings up a common misconception when thinking about statistics and interpreting your data.
THE SITUATION ABOVE HAS NOTHING TO [...]

UPDATE: After reading this, don’t forget to check out Part II: Using Incentives
Many of us continually fight the battle of low-response rates.
My first professional experience with surveying occurred more than 30 years ago. I simply wanted to get the opinions of particular professionals at eleven different colleges in my state and I developed a two [...]

SurveyGizmo is proud to partner with South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX to bring real-time, online evaluations to the conference for the first time ever. The new tool rate.sxsw.com will allow SXSW to manage the evaluations of over 300 sessions and an audience of 4,000. From the attendee’s perspective they can manage which [...]

“Attitude is everything” has significance for more than just football or other sports! Cultivating a sampling attitude can help you “win” improvements to your survey process.
We have already seen the power of sampling in predicting election results in my prior post on election sampling and intuition tells us that sampling should save time and money. [...]

Ranking questions provide the order of preference of select items from the survey respondent. Manipulating the Ranking questions is easy using the arrows to the right of each option, but there are a few considerations that are important to note about the behaviour of Ranking questions:

If no options are changed/moved, the question is considered unanswered [...]

Election season is the time for lots of polls, which makes it a good time to highlight what they can teach us about our surveys! Basically a poll is just a type of survey and so the principles that make polling powerful apply to surveys.
Can the results of polls be trusted? I just read an [...]

We had a great turn out and lots of excellent discussion at last week’s Best Practices in Survey Design webinar. Bill Johnston of JWB Research co-hosted it with me. Many people asked if they could have a copy of the slides so here they are for downloading in PDF format.
We hope you find these [...]

A type of survey in which there is much interest this month is the political poll. Questions I hear a lot are, “Can the polls be trusted?” and “How can they get away with polling so few people?”
We can increase our understanding of polls by answering two questions:

How can polls be accurate with such seemingly [...]

Yesterday, we ran across a very interesting and valuable blog for anyone conducting surveys with email invitations.
It was written by Alex Leverington, a consumer aghast at the bad email practices he’s found recently in several survey invitations. His blog post provides an insight into the mind of the folks receiving your emails and answering [...]

It’s been awhile and 2008 has been a busy year. It has also been a year where people have been looking to get more out of their surveys. I have had a steady stream of people coming to me with questions like:

I have all this data, but I’m not sure what it is telling me?
How [...]

Here is a great tip for anyone that uses our embedded surveys in their website and wants to survey only a portion of their visitors.
Yesterday a customer asked how to use this feature and we thought it would make a great mini-tutorial. This customer wanted to survey a small percentage of this visitors, 10%, and [...]

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” wrote one of our customers after we recommended he use the Firefox browser for his survey work this week.
At over 200 pages and growing, his survey is one of the longest surveys ever created in SurveyGizmo.
Using Internet Explorer 6 on a 4-year-old computer, he had to wait more than 5 minutes-that’s [...]

SurveyGizmo has been invited to speak about making surveys accessible and building accessible forms for EASI, Equal Access to Software and Information. EASI hosts weekly webinars on a variety of online accessibility topics. You can read more about their Accessibility Webinar schedule here or go directly to the sign-up for “Making Accessible Online Surveys”.
EASI’s [...]

Evaluating SurveyGizmo?
Want to develop your survey skills?
Improve your ROI?
Try our free webinars.
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 [...]

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. [...]

I’m back with some accepted best practices that I promised from my article Surveys for Fun or Profit? You may have already seen the Top Ten Survey Best Practices list that Christian Vanek and I delivered at a free SurveyGizmo Webinar at the end of September. If not, I encourage you to check it out. [...]

Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s webinar “Top Ten Survey Best Practices.” Here is the follow-up info we promised.
Slides in PowerPoint format:

Top Ten Survey Best Practices.ppt

Webinar Recording:

Streaming Flash Player
Windows Media - 37 meg - right-click to Save as…
AVI - 83 meg - right-click to Save as…

Selected Q&A
What is a good way [...]

SurveyGizmo co-founder Christian Vanek is featured this week in a nice article at MarketingSherpa - Special Report: How to Conduct Email Surveys - Tips to Lift Response & Write Subject Lines.
Vanek says ROI “should not be measured based on the number of responses you collect, but on the effect that the knowledge you gained [...]

Surveys can be fun! Newspapers, TV programs, radio shows and the like love to quote survey results because audiences find them entertaining. We enjoy learning other people’s personal habits or political views and seeing where we fit in. (Check out SurveyGizmo’s ipoll application (ipoll.surveygizmo.com) for some fun examples.)
But surveys are also a critical component of [...]

Update: A more recent accessible survey tool comparison was done by Ohio State University.
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 [...]

SurveyGizmo is happy to announce that we now have HIPAA and Safe Harbor certifications. If you have never heard of these, you could probably stop reading here, but some of our customers (or wannabe customers) have been urging us for this. These are two forms of personal information protection. HIPAA is a US law regarding [...]

At Survey Design and Analysis I am the resident survey expert and statistician. Okay I admit it, “I am a statistician..” Statistics is a big part of Market Research but I’m not sure that is well understood.
What exactly is a statistician and why is it important in Market Research? Quality Improvement guru, Bill Sherkenbach [...]

Why do people do surveys?
I don’t like the use of extrinsic incentives (bribes) for doing surveys. Wrong motivation, wrong expectations, wrong outcome!
Experiment in the Woods
I recently hired a dozen workers. I divided them at random into two groups of six. I took them out to the woods and took group A to a clearing with [...]

We’re happy to welcome survey expert Ed Halteman to the SurveyGizmo family. Ed took his first course on survey design in 1978 and has designed and analyzed more than 250 surveys in the past 10 years. Ed, who has a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in statistics, currently heads Survey Design [...]

Want to know the first mistake many companies make when designing surveys? Are you looking for a nifty trick when testing a survey? Confused about how SurveyGizmo’s new filter tool works when you’re creating a report?
We’ve added a couple new tutorials this week: The “Sweet Sixteen” Tips For Building Online Surveys and Creating a Report: [...]

A SurveyGizmo user dramatically boosts conversion: A whopping 69% of those viewing a newsletter sign-up page join, and of this group, an enormous 81% complete a pre-qualification sale form.

This simple but highly effective case study builds on our previous articles on using SurveyGizmo for Contact forms. You can go back and catch up on those [...]

In Part 1 Contact Forms & Lead Generation with SurveyGizmo, we showed how you can use SurveyGizmo not just for surveys but also as a powerful web form creator. We use it right here on SurveyGizmo.com with our Contact Form. In this article we will show you how SurveyGizmo can help you increase the percentage [...]

I came across “Is Your Company a Customer Survey Score Whore?” at MarketingProfs.com today. Although it speaks to offline customer satisfaction surveys, I still think there are great lessons to keep in mind as you build online surveys through SurveyGizmo.
MarketingProfs has reserved the actual benchmark results for premium members — but everyone [...]