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)

We currently have a plethora of questions we want to ask you, but as usual want to know if you have questions you want to ask your peers as well.

The “Poll of the Week” will be shown for just one week, and after the week is up, we’ll send out the results and you’ll then be able to use them for your own research purposes.

That brings us to what questions you want to ask. A wide range of professionals will be taking these polls, so you’ll have a large enough sample size to make appropriate assumptions from the data given.

Just email us at marketing@sgizmo.com with your poll question with answer options, and we’ll try and include it in our weekly poll. If you don’t have an exact question in mind, but have a topic you’d like to see covered, feel free to forward that on as well.

Keep your eyes peeled for the surveys to start coming out, and more importantly be sure to sign-up for the weekly email to see the results once we launch everything!

Maybe you want to ask them more than one question — that’s easy too! All you need to is create a survey with multiple questions and insert into your blog (this is how you would do the Cosmo-esque personality quiz.)

So how do you actually do it?

First, you’ll want to decide what type of questions you’re going to ask. If you only need to ask one question, then use a poll because it’s simple and the poll results graph is already included on the thank-you which results in less work for you.

For everything else, go with the regular survey option. Add all your questions, if you’re wanting to create the personality quiz, you’ll want to use this tutorial to do it.

Once you’re done creating your survey, just hop on over to the Publish page and click on the embed code you want to use (We recommend the JavaScript embed code because it is the quickest option.)

Then all you have to do is be sure that you’re in your blog’s code editor, and not the WYSIWYG editor, and copy and paste the embed code into your blog post. It’s as easy as that! I’ve added a quick poll to this post, so you can see what it looks like.

As always, if you’re using polls or surveys in your blog, we’d love to hear about how you do it.

Please note – If you’re using a community blog portal (meaning you didn’t install the blog software into your website on your own or you’re not allowed to turn off the WYSIWYG editor), that blog portal will strip the “script” tag and will not allow you to embed the survey into your site.

If you’re using a free blog, your best bet would be to put a link to your survey on your site and then format your survey to look like your site. That way you will create an uninterrupted flow from your site to the survey.

So without any further ado, here are the most recent tips: 

1. The Poll Charts feature allows respondents to view the overall results of the poll 

2. Associate a descriptive label to each of the numbers when using satisfaction scale questions 

3. The Auto-format features forces survey taker to enter a particular value rather than a random answer  

4. If you notify respondents in advance of sending the survey they’ll be more likely to recognize the survey when it arrives 

5. If you had a particularly long survey, consider using the Save And Continue Button feature  

If you can’t wait for the weekly update be sure to follow SurveyGizmo on twitter to get the new tip each day. You can find the compiled lists of the Survey Tip of the Day and additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the SurveyGizmo blog as well as links to helpful SurveyGizmo tutorials. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave us a comment or send us an email, SurveyGizmo is all about feedback.

Small in size a poll packs a powerful punch, allowing you to get a quick snapshot of data without putting a dent in your response limit. That’s right, simple polls don’t count toward your monthly response limit—talk about “free”dom of information.

In order to help you, our beloved user, get the most of this powerful tool we’ve put together a little getting started guide. To begin, select Create a Poll from your SurveyGizmo 3.0 dashboard.

You’ll then see a screen entitled “New Poll Project.” For our savvy, seasoned SurveyGizmo users this screen will feel reminiscent of the initial survey setup page. All of our users will be delighted to know that this screen is the first and last step of the poll creation project.

The poll creation process has a lot in common with question creation. After you decide on an insightful question, you’ll create your poll options following the same one-per-line format as a survey question. Should you prefer to fine tune your reporting values you can do so later in the question editor or by entering them in the Option Title|Reporting Value format.

Vote protection for your poll defaults to cookies ‘cuz we love them. And, they’re best choice for preventing vote stuffing without locking out multiple users who happen to share an IP. The decision is yours, and for help with that decisions please read our article on Duplicate Response Protection with Embedded Surveys.

Since it’s hard to get through your day without hearing about the importance of social media there’s even an option to take your poll from wallflower to social butterfly. By checking the “Share” box respondents can spread your poll like dandelion seeds on Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and more!

Now that you’ve made the big decisions, all that’s left to do is a select a size that fits your site or blog best. And then, without further ado, it’s time to click “Create Poll Now!” and bring that puppy to life! Then, from the Publish tab, grab your survey’s code. Remember, polls must be embedded, so you’ll need to tuck it into your website or blog. And, as always, if you’d like, you can fine tune your poll just as you do a question within the Project Editor.

We can increase our understanding of polls by answering two questions:

1. How can polls be accurate with such seemingly small samples?
2. How do we align popular polls with reality? (The general form of this question — How do we align our survey research with the real world? is important in all survey research.)

Political polls rely on two statistical principles for their trustworthiness — randomness and weighting.

Think back to high school. Picture yourself in your cafeteria at lunch time. Your task is to pick one person at a time and ask the question, “Who do you want to win the election for student body president?”

How many students do you think you will have to poll before your overall results no longer change very much? Eight people? 15? 25? 50?

As a rule of thumb, your results are going to be reasonably stable after you’ve queried 30 people, provided your selections have been truly random.

How do we achieve random results? It’s difficult and it is critical to the reliability of small sample sizes. Obviously, in the cafeteria example above, you’re not going to query six of your friends all seated at the same table. But what else will affect the randomness of your sample? Here are some questions to consider in the current example:

1. Is there only one cafeteria in your school and is every student equally likely to use it?
2. How many lunch periods are there during a day? Is there any bias regarding which students go to lunch at which hours of the day? For instance, do freshmen all go to Lunch I; sophomores to Lunch II; etc.?
3. What affects seating patterns? Is there a salad bar? A hot lunch queue? Do students who bring their lunches to school eat in the cafeteria or outside on the campus?
4. Can polling at lunch time in the cafeteria account for students who take post-secondary options in the afternoon? Or do they leave the building before lunch and head to their other classes?
5. In selecting students to poll, did you inadvertently avoid people you’re uncomfortable with? (Maybe you should have had someone from another school select respondents and conduct the poll.)

Let’s say you’ve satisfied yourself that polling in the cafeteria is going to work. You go ahead and conduct your poll and you find that, after you’ve polled 30 students you have talked with 9 freshmen, 8 sophomores, 5 juniors and 8 seniors. Here are your data:

Overall, it looks close — maybe a tie!

One of the downsides of randomness is it is not guaranteed to generate representative samples. You know that, in your school, 30 percent of the students are freshmen, 27 percent are sophomores, 23 percent are juniors and 20 percent are seniors.

So your random sample does not represent your electorate on a key variable — class. Therefore, we weight.

Here is the distribution of your students by class:

And here is how we adjust our polling data to represent what we think will happen on Election Day. (There are several methods for weighting our poll results but they all arrive at the same result.)

So, what looked like a pretty close race, may actually be an 8-point victory for Henry. Of course, how well your poll reflects reality will depend partly on the validity of your weighting assumption, that is, that the class you are in affects for whom you will vote.

So this is where polling starts. Of course, there’s a lot more to it, such as:

• Confidence intervals
• Timing of the poll
• Whether or not those that we poll will actually vote
• How to represent students who may vote but never go in the cafeteria
• Controlling for students who lied to us about their choice.

Also, we know that with weighting we have made our sample more representative of the school overall, but how do we know that we’ve represented each class reliably? All of these things affect poll results also. Randomness and weighting, however, are what give us a firm methodological beginning.

Randomness and weighting are part of how polls generate reasonable results with what appear to be small sample sizes. But there’s another important question to pose to align polling with reality. That is, how do we align popular polls with the Electoral College? For that, see http://www.electoral-vote.com. It is an excellent site. It aligns popular polls with the realities of the Electoral College and you can learn how they do it by reading the FAQs.