We are having so much fun hosting all the various user meet-ups, we decided that it’s about time to host one in our neck of the woods — in Denver!
So, if you’re one of our local users in the Denver/Boulder area, feel free to stop by Lucile’s Cafe in Denver a week from today (Wednesday, [...]

Have you ever noticed a large number of partial completions of your survey? Have you ever wanted to know what you could fix in order to get people to finish your survey?
Well, we have a fantastic answer for you! If you have an Enterprise or above level account, you now have the ability to run [...]

Hey Everyone!
Just a quick note to let everyone know that tomorrow several updates to the API will be going live at 5pm MT. We are adding five new functions to the API — and making several small modifications to the existing calls. Keep an eye on the API documentation page at 5pm on [...]

Incentives are an important part of anything you do in business, and employee profit sharing is an obvious example. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our profit sharing plan and struck on something that seems to be working for both employees and customers. We thought we’d share it with the world.
We asked ourselves, [...]

Our very own Mario Lurig will be heading off to Portland, Oregon to host our second-ever User Lunch Meet-up. The first Meet-up that Derek hosted in Chicago went off so fantastically that we thought, “Why not try it again?”
So, if you’re in the Portland area on Friday, July 3rd around Noon and would like [...]

In celebration of July 4th this year, SurveyGizmo is offering any customer who upgrades to an annual Enterprise or Professional account between now and July 4th, 2009 a free branded survey template designed by one of our own designers! And don’t forget, when you upgrade to an annual account you receive a 10% off discount!
One [...]

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week:

New Feature: Question Library added
New Feature: Page Falloff report added, providing two graphs of the same data (funnel type and ‘difference’) - Enterprise level
New Feature: Textbox questions have extreme left and extreme right label options
New Feature: In tables/matrices, you can now repeat the column headers every X number [...]

Sometimes little changes draw a lot of attention to minor details. In this case, recent updates to the look of the ‘Overview’ page of your survey has put the survey world map front-and-center for many customers. To go along with that, many have asked if there was a way to include the map within the [...]

SurveyGizmo is happy to announce our newest feature, the Question Library.

This has been long sought after by many users so we decided to rally around the effort and get this one out. Your Survey Question Library is available at all paid plan levels.
Right out of the gate the question library includes [...]

Every year the Boulder County Business Report names the top 100 fastest growing companies to their Mercury 100 list. We are proud to announce that on Thursday, May 28th, SurveyGizmo was named the 5th fastest growing company in Boulder and Broomfield counties. The Mercury 100 list is compiled by ranking companies in Boulder and Broomfield [...]

It seems that the Thai Hot Peppers from the Open House motivated our tutorial team to create two new tutorials! The first one offers a method to create a true Semantic Differential table from combined Rating Scale/Likert Scale radio button questions with a dash of CSS styling. The second post applies most commonly to customers [...]

Two days ago I convinced myself that the world would end tragically if I didn’t get my hands on the new Nintendo DSi (and I was right - I heard rumors of tornadoes dying and seas calming as I signed my name on the receipt).
So I got home and immediately downloaded the free DSi Web [...]

After many requests and some slots opening up in our Development Team’s time, we were able to roll out a very cool new feature for our Enterprise account users. We now have the ability to schedule Email Invitations to be sent out on specific dates, as well as the ability to schedule Reminder and [...]

We had about 75 people visit for our Open House this past Friday, and wanted to share some pictures of the new office and everyone having a great time. We have a saying around here, we take our work seriously, but not ourselves. I think that shows in these pictures!
To all of you who came [...]

At SurveyGizmo, month-to-month billing refers to getting billed for 1 month from your sign-up/upgrade date. If you sign-up on the 19th of the month, you will not be billed for your next month until the 19th of the following month. Thus, there is no need to worry about paying full price for part of a [...]

Small organizations, companies, and departments sometimes need multiple users to be logged into their one SurveyGizmo account, working inside the online survey tool simultaneously. SurveyGizmo offers 5 users with unique usernames/email addresses and passwords who can access the account at any time as part of the Pro account level, for $49/month. No additional fees for [...]

After many requests, we have now added one of the coolest CAPTCHA question types out there. A CAPTCHA is an image that is displayed that requires the participant to enter the letters they see in the image in order to continue to the next page of the survey.
We’re using a service called reCAPTCHA, and the [...]

It’s starting to look a lot like summer around here in Boulder, and you know what that means — summer reading!
We thought: a fun way to get all of our users as well as our SurveyGizmo-ers reading this summer would be to start a SurveyGizmo Book Club.

As some of you may have heard, these past few weeks we have been moving into our newer, 3 times bigger, even brighter, with 3 times the amount of decks (see side photo of one of the decks), office. And we are all officially moved in and ready to invite you over!
We’re loving this [...]

Thank you to all of you who attended last week’s Best Practices in Survey Design webinar with Bill Johnston and Scott McDaniel. Below, in case you missed the webinar, or would just like a refresher, you can listen to the audio from the webinar, as well as download the PowerPoint slides.

Download Best Practices [...]

As some of you may have noticed, a few weeks back, we had our first SurveyGizmo User Lunch. We had a fantastic turn out, and a great time (according to Derek, our host for that event), and we want to keep the ball rolling.
What we would like to do now, is find out where [...]

Calling All SurveyGizmo Users!
As many of you have heard, our development team has been hard at work creating the second version of SurveyGizmo. It will be even more feature-packed, faster, and even easier to use!
Now, with that being said, we need some of you guys to tell us what you think about what our [...]

SurveyGizmo has formed a team for the first time this year to ride in BikeMS Colorado, a 150 mile ride over two days (75 miles each day) to raise awareness and money for Multiple Sclerosis research through the National MS Society. We are raising funds as individuals and as a team through the team’s BikeMS [...]

As part of Earth day (yes, we know it was a week ago), we thought we’d see what you guys have been doing to help the environment lately?
Have you planted a tree in honor of Earth day? Have you changed all your old light bulbs to CFL’s? Are you carpooling with co-workers? Or are you [...]

Our friends over at RockyRadar recently interviewed our CEO (Scott McDaniel) and did an awesome write-up about SurveyGizmo. You should definitely go check it out.
Here’s a little “sneak peek” of the interview, and I highly recommend reading the rest of it!
When asked how a typical customer uses his products, SurveyGizmo CEO Scott McDaniel admits, [...]

Are you already part of Twitter or are you looking for an excuse to join in and start “Tweeting”? Well, you’re in the right place!
By creating a Twitter account and following SurveyGizmo, you’ll be able to enter our “Twitter-only” contests, where you can win things like a tub of Red Vines (they’re our favs!), some [...]

The Advanced Rule Writing tutorial continues to be a popular tutorial for Professional and Enterprise level customers of SurveyGizmo, as they get more involved in the advanced logic available. This tutorial, as well as the Merge Codes tutorial, have recently been updated with some tools to help you check your rules and merge codes for [...]

The following quiz can be built with the Personal plan level
Some of the most interesting surveys incorporate multiple features of SurveyGizmo together to create something really exciting. Our pass/fail quiz feature already records the answers of the respondent, scores it, and provides feedback to the respondent when completing the survey. However, here at SurveyGizmo, we [...]

We use CampaignMonitor.com for some of our needs here at SurveyGizmo, and we used their great API to push subscribers from our surveys and forms directly into our list maintained on CampaignMonitor. In an effort to not be selfish with this great feature, we’ve included the instructions on a new Integration Tutorial, Adding Subscribers to [...]

UPDATE: Click here for the official invitation! We will being having lunch this Thursday, at 11:45 AM, at the Grand Lux Cafe on Michigan and Ontario in Chicago
Do you live in Chicago? Do you use SurveyGizmo? Do you like lunch?
If you answered yes to the above questions, then you’re in luck! On [...]

Rich multimedia content is all over the web, and embedded audio, video, even documents are integrated into every blog, website, and social network. SurveyGizmo is powerful enough to support this content as well, though the task can be daunting if you have never created it yourself. Thus, a new tutorial has been added to provide [...]

It’s infamous, and it’s back; the Ask Tech Support series continues to address the ‘collective consciousness’ of users by addressing common tricks and tips when using SurveyGizmo.
When asking the same question of multiple items, such as rating your satisfaction with different products from a company, it makes sense to use a table or matrix. Each [...]

This week, I’d like to re-introduce a feature that many of you have used for the past couple of years– the survey back button.
The survey back button is a handy little feature that allows survey takers to go back and forth between pages within a survey. This is great for people (like me) [...]

We’ve been growing our customer base like crazy these past few months, and since we pride ourselves in the support we bring to our customers, we have been finding ourselves in need of a few more Customer Support Managers. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce our 2 newest Customer Support Ninjas — [...]

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 [...]

Have you ever wanted to show your survey takers different thank you pages depending on how they answered certain questions throughout your survey, but still wanted to collect the completion rate data?
Well we have solution for you!
We won’t actually be creating separate Thank You pages (because you can’t really do that and collect the information [...]

Update: Our famed quiz guru - Mario Lurig (also known for his account management skills) will be hosting this webinar. So be sure to check it out!
We are constantly trying to think of new topics for webinars, and since many of you have been asking about quizzes lately, we decided to add a webinar designed [...]

SurveyGizmo’s Enterprise level account offers a range of features for the advanced user. One of the most powerful features is HTTP POST. The HTTP POST allows SurveyGizmo to interact with other websites in one of three primary ways:

Send data to a website so it can be updated or captured
Display the output from another website
Send data [...]

It’s funny how you’ll hear similar topics come up within the same week — it happens all the time over here where we will get similar requests for features from all of you at the same time (we like to refer to it as a “collective consciousness”), but this time it has happened within the [...]

Back in October, Upshot Institute nominated us for their Upshot50 Marketing Technology Award. This award recognizes companies that are “offering the most innovative, powerful and useful marketing tools and technologies.” After a few months of receiving and then tallying votes, they finally posted the winners.
Guess what? SurveyGizmo made the list! We are [...]

Sometimes digging up the past leads to a better future. This is one of those cases where a feature that once existed was replaced with a simpler and easier to use version. As the tool grew and documentation improved, more and more users are looking for the advanced version once again.
In this case, I’m talking [...]

This past weekend, Derek (our VP of Sales and Business Development) had the chance to take all the listeners of Chris Pirillo’s weekly GoToMeeting session through a step by step tour of how to create an online survey using SurveyGizmo.
During the session, Derek creates a quick and easy survey to show all of Chris’s viewers [...]

As some of you may have noticed, the website looks a little different. After months of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, we were finally able to launch the new look and feel to our www.surveygizmo.com site on Tuesday afternoon.
A big round of applause goes out to everyone here at SurveyGizmo for helping on [...]

It’s been a while!
We’ve been hard at work improving SurveyGizmo, and you will all see some changes start to rollout soon.
But what we really wanted to let you all know about today is a little promotional item we created right before the holidays.
We had some really awesome custom stickers made by our friends over at [...]

SurveyGizmo affords multiple ways to do logic when building your survey, and disqualifying respondents is no exception. There are two primary methods for disqualifying a respondent, depending on the goal:

Advanced Page Jumping & Logic - Setup at the bottom of each page with a disqualification question, choose the ‘Disqualify Respondent’ option and provide a message [...]

Scenario #1:
You created your survey, tested it in both Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers, and found a strange occurrence. When viewing a particular page in Firefox, it displays completely and works perfectly. However, when looking at it in Internet Explorer, it seems to be ‘cut-off’ and not displayed properly.
Scenario #2:
Some of your survey [...]

Did you know you can reduce your 2008 tax bill this year by squeezing in some business expenses you’ll need next year? If you’ll be surveying next year, purchase or extend your annual subscription by December 31st.
In addition, save an additional 10% on SurveyGizmo with a prepaid Annual Account. Instead of a monthly subscription, you [...]

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 [...]

So you’ve completed your survey and now you wonder what you can learn from your data.
That’s easy, isn’t it? Three months ago, your survey began with a set of questions. Now you’ve got your data. Look up the answers!! Oh - and don’t forget the PowerPoint slides. Make them pretty.
But there must be more to [...]

For Pro and Enterprise level accounts, the email invitation system has the ability to send out Reminder and Thank You emails to the contacts on the email invitation list. Within these, you have a few default options that help determine which respondents on your contact list will receive these emails. First and foremost, let’s discuss [...]

The Accessing Higher Ground Conference has officially started, and Scott McDaniel (SurveyGizmo’s CEO) will be speaking later on today about Accessible Online Forms. The conference is specially tailored for those in the Higher Education community and focuses on how to create a more accessible environment for those who have physical, sensory, and learning disabilities. [...]

Nothing says tricky like an undocumented hidden feature. As some have found, there is an additional feature for checkbox questions in SurveyGizmo called ‘None of the Above’. This has been mentioned in our forums since this original post. Since this is an undocumented feature, there are some assumptions and confusion about its [...]

Have you ever wondered how to write one of our advanced show/when or show/hide rules? Or have you needed to make a rule based off of the answers to two or more questions and you weren’t sure how? Well, you’re in luck! We now have a full tutorial on advanced rule writing that will [...]

SurveyGizmo CEO, Scott McDaniel, has the honor of speaking at the 11th Annual, Accessing Higher Ground Conference on Thursday, November 13, 2008.
The conference is all about creating an accessible environment for those who may have physical, sensory, or learning disabilities in an Higher Education setting. It is hosted by the University of Colorado- Boulder and [...]

Dr. Glen Livingston is a psychiatrist turned market researcher who teaches a highly effective method of market research using surveys to pre-test niche markets for profitability.
One of his students recently did some research looking for online survey tools that best meet the needs of those who use the Livingston Method of market research.
The three most [...]

The ability to embed a survey into a webpage using a simple cut and paste of JavaScript code provided by SurveyGizmo is one of the favorite features of SurveyGizmo users. However, sometimes there is a bit of a confusion on the way the JavaScript embed will interact with your visitors. So for this Ask [...]

SurveyGizmo’s CEO, Scott McDaniel, has been asked to speak at University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business MBA Marketing Club next week.
He has been asked to speak on a wide variety of topics including his real life success in becoming an entrepreneur, marketer, and developer. If you’re part of CU’s Leeds School of Business MBA [...]

At SurveyGizmo we value the environment (heck- our offices are based in Boulder, CO) and that’s why a few of us have gotten together and started carpooling.
Yes, we do realize that we could single-handedly take out a good portion of SurveyGizmo if we were to get into an accident (knock on wood), but we have [...]

As you may have noticed, we have added Bill Johnston to our survey expert team. Right now he is compiling a list of topics he wants to cover in the coming months and would really appreciate your input. Please fill out the following survey so we can make sure to address the topics that [...]

With this post we start a new series called Ask Tech Support, where we go over a question or topic that has come up recently while helping our customers. There is a collective consciousness with SurveyGizmo customers, because a single question seems to arrive all at once from multiple customers, and this becomes perfect content [...]

One of our newest SurveyGizmo users, Pauli Price, recently came to us because she wanted to use our survey API for the Rails Rumble 2008 contest that she is involved in.
Pauli gave us a quick run-down interview of the contest as well as how her group is integrating SurveyGizmo into their, hopefully award-winning, project.
It’s always [...]

As some of you may or may not have heard, our developers have been hard at work creating a new and improved version of SurveyGizmo.
Right now we’re in the Seventh Inning stretch and want to know if there are any last-minute feature requests you’d like to sneak into Version 2.0. We’ve already collected a ton [...]

Thousands of new customers are flocking to SurveyGizmo every month and some of them are really big. Really, really big.
That’s fantastic and we are all very happy. Though, in order to handle the increased traffic from all the new users we decided to make some changes. Some big changes actually…
Last [...]

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week.

Quiz scores can now be reported on, even if on the Thank You page.
New Feature. Can now pipe from a single answer question (e.g.radio button, dropdown) to another question.
Speed of exporting large response sets (50,000+) to csv improved.
Non administrators now have the ability to change their own passwords [...]

We have some exciting news!
SurveyGizmo has been nominated as one of Upshot Institute’s top 50 marketing technology companies! We have been put there along side a few other online survey companies as well as some other really cool up and coming companies focused on marketing tools and technology.
Here is a little blurb from the Upshot [...]

Mario has been hard at work trying to keep up with the demand for new tutorials, and he has recently rolled out a new one on Duplicate Response Protection, what it is and how to use it. He hits on the three options we now have- Cookie based protection, IP based protection, plus our newest [...]

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 [...]

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week.

Bug fix on Report exports. Table of dropdowns improved in the Excel, Word and PDF export.
Validation added to SPSS export wizard for variable names.
Greek characters now export to SPSS correctly.
Improved ranking question export.
Custom scripting API functions added. sgapiGetResponseBySGUID. sgapiTrimStr (improved to trim spaces on right [...]

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 [...]

We get quite a few calls and emails asking how to pass tracking/pre-population data into SurveyGizmo through the survey link. So many calls in fact that we set out on an epic struggle to create three in-depth tutorials on the use of URL strings (a.k.a. query strings) and SurveyGizmo Links.
If you are not familiar [...]

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week.

New Feature: Reminders and Thank You’s are now copied when you copy an Email Invitation.
New Feature: You can now search abandoned and deleted responses.
New Feature: You can now search by IP or referrer URL.
Several bug fixes for SPSS
Bug fix. You can now copy an Email Invitation while [...]

Update: We are now on a new and improved primary database cluster and everything is running smoothly.
In an effort to keep you informed, we’d like you to know our application server went down for 17 minutes and 30 seconds today, starting at approximately 5:30 EST. Within 60 seconds our development team was addressing the [...]

Somewhere between improving SurveyGizmo for everyone and assisting our customers, someone found the time to add a few more quick tips for the Look & Feel of your survey. They may not be big issues, and they definitely don’t effect everyone, but sometimes it’s the little things that make your survey that much cooler. So [...]

SurveyGizmo has open positions for a person who straddles web designer/developer, as well as a spot for another PHP Software Engineer. If you’re interested or know someone who might be please check out available jobs at SurveyGizmo
Thanks!

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week.

Feature improvement. SurveyGizmo interface images improved.
Survey Question Editor. Design of survey Question Editor improved.

Survey Question Editor. Ability to change question types on the fly.
Major overhaul of SPSS export wizard: Ability to assign SPSS variable names. Ability to assign SPSS labels. Ability to change SPSS variable types during [...]

We thought it would be fun to show some real life examples of the cool things our customers are doing with SurveyGizmo. Today we are going to feature user Majed Ghadhban’s Arabic survey and user Jeremy Feinstein and his very professional Excel-esque Employee Compensation Online Survey.
So what’s so cool about Majed’s survey? Well, he is [...]

Check out SurveyGizmo Co-Founder, Scott McDaniel’s interview with Rob McNealy from “Startup Story Radio.”  Scott talks about how to use SurveyGizmo as a cost effective marketing tool for entrepreneurs in all stages of the start-up process.
Rob McNealy, an entrepreneur enthusiast, hosts Startup Story Radio– a daily small business and startup podcast.  Rob interviews various start-ups [...]

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week.

Bug fix. Bug in Report question numbering fixed.
Bug fix. No more erroneous security warnings in Reports.
Bug fix. Copying of Custom Matrix questions now works properly.
New feature. Ability to search Email Invite contacts.
Improvement. Greek characters now supported in csv exports.
Feature improvement. Improvements to survey Word export.
New feature. Can [...]

It’s now easier to save and restart long online surveys. Today we launched a feature to all Pro and Enterprise users to add a Save and Continue link to their online surveys. We’ve been busy over here in Boulder and Cambridge testing and building the next version of SurveyGizmo (more on that later). While [...]

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week.

New reporting option: You can now enable/disable the grouping of insignificant categories into an ‘other’ group for pie chart and bar charts
SPSS: Open text ‘number’ fields now import into SPSS as numbers
SPSS: Essay questions now export as a 3000 length character fields in SPSS
SPSS: Image [...]

This Week’s Service Updates: a short list this week as we concentrate on SurveyGizmo 2.0!

Improved Response Time ‘Partial’ and ‘In Progress’ survey responses are no longer delayed, you can quite literally watch someone progress through a survey from the your browse response screens.
Survey Email Invitation deliverability improved (even more) We have upgraded the transmission rate [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 two-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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Unfortunately, the WYSIWYG editor and the Spell Checker did not get along. Bad spellers stay tuned for Spell Check, the second coming!
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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We’re having a new feature round-up webinar
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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

We recently discovered that SurveyGizmo surveys work quite well on mobile phones. Go figure! So this week’s big new feature is the ability to trigger & schedule mobile text messages from a survey. In addition, we have added a new survey template for designing mobile surveys called the “Mobile Survey Template.” Take a [...]

Although we don’t want to outshine this week’s other big feature release (the ability to upload images), we are happy to announce a new question type, the “Custom Matrix.” (If anyone has a better name for it, please, speak up!)
Like our other Matrix questions, this one allows you to ask several questions at once [...]

Our New Feature Roster is packed with our enhancements to SurveyGizmo, but we want to make sure you don’t overlook a major new feature that many of you have requested: uploading files for use in your surveys. Now you can easily upload images, such as your company logo, and add them to your surveys. You’ll [...]

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 [...]

We’re happy to announce that you now have the ability to use PayPal to pay for an upgrade to your SurveyGizmo account. A few of you, especially our non-US customers, have had difficulty with credit card transactions not being accepted by our system, and we invite you to take advantage of this quick and easy [...]

Spread the word and make some cash! Many of you asked us for it, so here it is. Today we’re announcing the SurveyGizmo Affiliate Program, which lets you earn cash for your referrals. Anyone with a SurveyGizmo account — even a Free one — can direct people to our site through this program. And when [...]

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 [...]

Last week at SxSW Scott and I agreed not to post boring “feature release” blog posts anymore. But I’m going to turn right around and make an exception in this case, because exporting to SPSS is a long-awaited feature for many of our research users.
For those of you not familiar with SPSS, it is [...]

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: [...]

Because Austin is the place to be in early March, we’re hitting the road and heading to SXSW Interactive (South by Southwest). The top interactive folks will be there, and it’s a a great place to network and pick up ideas. We’re hoping to meet up with some of you; getting your feedback is invaluable [...]

We’re constantly making improvements to our product and our site, and now you can keep track of those improvements — at a glance. If you have been away from SurveyGizmo for a few days or (gasp) weeks, check out our New Feature Roster. This list will help you catch up and see what has improved [...]

We’re really excited to announce that we’ve teamed up with ExactTarget to offer highly integrated email and survey solutions for ExactTarget customers. This level of integration is groundbreaking. Sure, there have been integrated tools before, but now you have the full power of both an enterprise level survey tool combined with an enterprise level Email [...]

We’re excited to bring you our latest hot feature: the “friendly survey link.” The power is now in your hands; you have the ability to name your survey’s URL. No more seemingly random numbers must indicate which survey is yours. Instead, survey links can take the form of your company name (what we call your [...]

You asked for enhanced reporting tools — and we’ve responded. Last week we launched an entirely new reporting platform. Now you can save multiple reports in different ways, display data in eye-catching new graphs, and run reports while simultaneously working on a survey in SurveyGizmo.
Think we’re kidding about the eye-catching charts? Check this out:

If you [...]

Friday we got a call asking for our logo. When we asked why, we learned that PROFIT Magazine, a publication covering business and technology, will be naming SurveyGizmo one of the best new web tools available. We haven’t seen the article yet, but we’ll let you know more when we know more!

SurveyGizmo is growing, and we’d like to introduce you to our newest member: copywriter Heidi Anderson. Heidi has been covering technology for publications such as ClickZ, MarketingSherpa, SoftwareCEO and Smart Computing magazine for more than a decade, and she prides herself on translating from geek speak to plain English. Her first task will be to [...]

We’re excited to announce the availability of the SurveyGizmo API (version 1.9). It lets you write applications that dynamically interact with your surveys, campaigns and reporting!
The API is available to all customers and plans  from free to enterprise accounts. When you create a new plugin, it becomes available to SurveyGizmo users from our account [...]

We couldn’t help but notice all the searches for MySpace survey functionality. So here it is — online surveys and polls you can put on your MySpace page (or other difficult CMS systems)!
Want to see it in action? Here is an example of our contact form embedded into a MySpace profile: http://www.myspace.com/SurveyGizmo. [...]

Last Monday I attended MarketingSherpa’s Demand Generation Summit in Boston. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was there wearing my SurveyGizmo hat — taking copious notes on tactics on lead and demand generation. After all, as the new kids on the block, creating demand for our services is vital! I was [...]

Do you run surveys? Do you have a Mac? Then monitoring and managing your surveys is just one keystroke away, thanks to our brand new Apple dashboard widget, developed in partnership with wdgty.
For those of you who unfamiliar with the term, a widget is a mini-application that runs on the Apple OS X Dashboard. You [...]

Update: You can now add our surveys to Myspace: read about it.
We have noticed a bunch of searches on our site for MySpace.com surveys. We see incoming searches with MySpace Surveys. MySpace.com, for those with their heads in the sand, is the huge-normously successful social networking site that every marketer is salivating to get [...]

I did a little window dressing around the SurveyGizmo site this weekend. It’s a little more streamlined and we hope you like it. There is also a new search feature in the sidebar. It searchs both the blog and web pages.
A correction:
Our last entry noted out a new tutorial Auto-responders and Merge Helpers but gave [...]

We have added new tools and tutorials to make it easier to build better email auto-responders for your surveys. With the Merge Helper and Email Merge Helper, you can incorporate values from your survey automatically into a survey triggered email auto-responder.
What can you use the Email Auto-responders for?

Notifying you of each survey taken and providing [...]

We now have plugin for WordPress (the wildly popular blogging and website management software). This WordPress Survey Plugin allows you as a blogger to easily integrate surveys in your posts and web pages. You will want to create a free SurveyGizmo account to get started!
Then, you can then keep an eye on your response stats [...]

How many times have you wanted to quickly send out an invitation for a survey, then follow up with anyone who hasn’t finished it? How about emailing those who complete your survey to say ‘thank you’ or share final results with them?
Good news — we have just released a survey email invitation tool that lets [...]

This week we turned out two new customer requested features.
Email Validation (by DNS)
SurveyGizmo now goes a step further in email validation. Like most survey apps we used to just do simple format-checking for email validation. Now we have upgraded! Any question that collects email addresses will perform something called a “MX-lookup” (Mail-eXchange lookup) to [...]

We have some great news to share. We have installed a PHP accelerator called eAccelerator and it’s given us a real boost. We have seen a +40% increase in both the SurveyBuilder application and the speed of surveys to end users. Woo hoo! We are really happy about this and we’re sure you will be [...]

We pushed a few changes last night, some in response to bugs and some in response to user feedback.
We are trying out a change to the Survey Editor so you can now see the Edit/Copy/Delete Question buttons without hovering. We have always felt this page is a place a lot of survey tools could use [...]

Congratulations to David Chivers for winning a shinny brand new new iPod Shuffle (believe us, it was hard not tear off the plastic wrap and take it for a spin). David is with Meredith Corporation which among other things publishes magazines like Fitness, Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, and what seems like a [...]

As you noticed, we have two pre-made design templates available for you right now. But, starting next week we will begin adding one new template *every week* — with dramatically different styles and layouts.
Don’t forget that your designer (or our team) can add customized templates for you easily. Email me if you’d like more information [...]

SurveyGizmo is now gearing up to launch. In fact, we are going to be showing off at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit later this week.
If you notice any bugs or have a suggestion to make this a better application, please email Christian at service@sgizmo.com and we’ll get right on it!
In addition, we are looking for some [...]