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

survey-gizmo-ruby Ruby Gem

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

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

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

surveygizmo Ruby Gem

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

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

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

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

What’s Next

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

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

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.

Heat mapping helps you understand the impact of graphical or textual components within an advertisement. We all know certain locations garner more resonance than others, but how great would it be to test out an ad before publishing it?

I then started to think about advertising agencies. Knowing how to best position and market products and services is what clients expect, right? But how do they reach target audiences quickly within budget and deadline?

Well, SurveyGizmo now partnered with Cint can help do that. Instant market research through online sampling is a tremendous resource for getting the insight you need when you need it.

Cint has a unique model. Research buyers and panel owners, like media groups or even soccer moms, come to the Cint Panel Exchange, a transparent, open marketplace, to buy and sell consumer opinions. Because Cint doesn’t own any panels, all communities are affinity-based and highly engaged.

So, how does this help with ad campaigns?

With access to consumers, concept tests can be generated to analyze the perception of new concepts, products, etc. even before they launch. Compare different branding alternatives in a study generally consisting of 300 answers or create a pitch test to measure perceptions of a brand before talking about it with clients.

And here is where the fun begins. Launch a SurveyGizmo heat map survey of your ad by determining your target audience and adding Cint sampling capability. Instantly access the insight you need to best optimize ad space.

With the busiest quarter of the year fast approaching, competing to broadcast the best message in the best way matters more than ever. Having a tool to help assess the impact of my ads gives me an advantage over the competition and now you have it too…unless, you’re my competition in which case you never read this. :)

For those of you who don’t know it, Jive Software makes business intelligence social. Think of it as the ‘glue’ that holds together an organization – it lets you share relevant data, organize projects, and collaborate between users across an entire enterprise.

The collaboration allowed by Jive Software’s dashboard-centric approach seems like the perfect place to share survey results – so that’s just what we’ve done. Using the SurveyGizmo survey API, we’ve partnered with Jive to natively integrate our application with the Jive platform.

The SurveyGizmo Jive App allows you to access your SurveyGizmo dashboard and reporting from within Jive. It’s now incredibly easy to see and share results with collaborators across your company who have the app installed. From within the Jive app you now have easy access to work with data from all your SurveyGizmo surveys.

To add the SurveyGizmo Jive App to your Jive dashboard, simply login to Jive and head to the Jive Apps Market. From there, you’ll be able to install the SurveyGizmo app with one click.

Jive is just one of the partners using SurveyGizmo’s API to enrich their applications – we’ve partnered with several companies like Mailchimp, Survey Deck, WordPress and more to bring SurveyGizmo’s data into their apps.

Interested in finding ways to integrate your systems directly with SurveyGizmo? Check out SurveyGizmo Developer’s Corner for resources to help you integrate with SurveyGizmo using our API.

Don’t have your own development team? No problem. Talk to our Professional Services team, who can easily integrate our application with your systems for you!

Whew… it’s been crazy couple of weeks here on the new feature front. Not only did we add an easy post to Twitter integration and a new Find & Replace feature, we’ve now just added an integration into MailChimp!

MailChimp is used for email marketing and email list management and it makes sending out emails and tracking email campaigns extremely easy. Integrating SurveyGizmo with MailChimp was a no-brainer; easy to use email marketing with easy to use online survey software equals one easy to use, well-rounded marketing campaign.

So, what does this integration with MailChimp actually do?

It allows you to send out your survey invitations directly through MailChimp with a click of a button. It’s great if you have your list already set up in MailChimp. Our MailChimp survey integration automatically creates a new Campaign inside of your MailChimp account, and you can use all of the features MailChimp has to offer including email themes, testing, and tracking. Your MailChimp survey link is then embedded into the survey button in the email, without you having to do anything.

The best part — if you use our MailChimp integration, you receive double your survey response limit for the month on our end and you receive a $25 credit to your MailChimp account from MailChimp. How awesome is that!?!

Activating the MailChimp integration inside your account

Head on over to your Account Settings link in the upper right hand corner of your account when you’re logged in. Then click on the API tab, add your MailChimp info and click save. Now, whenever you go to the Publish tab of your surveys, you’ll see that integration available to you. It’s as simple as that.

We love working with MailChimp and hope you enjoy the integration as much as we have enjoyed setting it up for you.

Now, with a single click, you can send your survey to Twitter and get all your follower’s to take it (and hopefully re-tweet it). This is all done from directly inside of SurveyGizmo’s publish page — you don’t even have to sign into Twitter to post it!

To start publishing to Twitter from inside of SurveyGizmo, you’ll need to let SurveyGizmo talk to your Twitter account. To do this, click on the Account Settings link in the upper right hand corner when you’re logged into your account. Then click on the API tab. Scroll down a little bit and enter in your Twitter login information. Then save all your settings.

Viola! You’re all set to start sending surveys over to Twitter. Just hop on over to one of your survey’s Publish pages and look for the “Tweet this survey to your followers”. You can customize the message you want to send (we allow you 120 characters, the other 20 are for the survey link) and then just hit the “Post this message to Twitter!” button and your tweet will be posted right away. See the image below.

We’d love to hear about how you’re using the new integration, so feel free to send us a tweet to @SurveyGizmo.

Happy Surveying and Tweeting!

If you are not familiar with this survey design technique, it can be very useful! For example, a common use is to pass a panel identifier into the survey from a panel provider, and then back out again in a redirect at the end of your survey. This lets the panel provider know which respondents finished your survey, which were bumped out due to quota, and which were disqualified so they can provide the correct reward. (This works with SSI, e-Rewards, Sample Network and other panel providers)

As a tech-savvy marketer I’m sure you’ll enjoy these techniques:

Part 1: Query String Basics – Passing data into a Survey or Form

Part 2: Query String Integration within SurveyGizmo

Part 3: Query String Examples and Uses

With any luck, you will find this collection of tutorials very useful and increase your understanding of the power hidden inside SurveyGizmo.

Best of luck in all your survey, form and research projects. Enjoy!

Why would we want to do this? Well, Google Analytics is a very powerful (and free) web analytics suite. With it you can track survey conversions, path analysis, sources of surveys traffic and even various versions of your forms and surveys. It’s the best of both worlds.

So let’s get the ball rolling:

Introduction to Google Integration Code

When you create a Google Analytics account you are given code snippets and instructed to place them at the bottom of each page on your website. For use in surveys, you will need to add them to the HTML Template of your Survey’s Theme.

The code should looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">//
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'YOUR GA CODE']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
 
  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); 
}
</script>

You should place this bit of code at the top of your survey’s HTML template (the very top).

First we are going to modify this bit just a little. Why? Because we want to track individual survey pages, and make them a bit easier to understand in Google Analytics.

So, here is what we are going to do. We are going to pass an argument (a bit of data) to the urchinTracker function that will identify individual pages of the survey. We are also going to create a “fake” folder for our survey. You will need to change two lines of the above code, one to add your GA Code, and another to reference a page in the survey. When finished with the changes, your whole code will look like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'YOUR GA CODE']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/surveys/surveyname/page[template("currentpagenumber")].html']);
 
  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
}
</script>

*Note – This has code has been updated to work with SurveyGizmo 3.0 surveys which use a new merge code system. If you are using a SurveyGizmo 2.0 survey, you’ll want to insert [%%:Survey_Page%%] instead of [template("currentpagenumber")] in order to track page numbers.

You should replace “surveyname” for every survey you integrate. Make it distinct and understandable. The merge code [template("currentpagenumber")] will merge in the current page number. Tip: If you want to get fancier you can merge in the value of a hidden question on the page, or even question data from previous pages this way.

Congratulations. When you launch your survey, it will store the navigation and traffic information to your Google Analytics account!

From here you can treat your “surveys” folder like it was just another part of your website. You can run your favorite reports, build charts graphs, etc. Enjoy!

Next week we will look into test variations of your surveys and landing pages and doing analysis in Google Analytics.

**This has been updated with the new Google Analytics code.