It will be my first time in both countries, so I’m looking forward to meeting some local SurveyGizmo users over some lunch or after work beverages. The specific dates are below, but we have also created a survey to gauge your interest in the meetup:

http://surveygizmo.new-zealand-australia-meetup.sgizmo.com/s3/

Here are the specific dates of interest:

• Monday, November 22nd in Sydney, Australia
• Thursday, November 25th in Auckland, New Zealand

We definitely need you to fill out the meetup survey to get the best idea of where and when to meet. As usual, lunch or the first round is on us, and I’m happy to talk about anything, especially SurveyGizmo related. On a side note, as this is my first international trip solo and first trip to both countries, your advice is very welcome! Feel free to email me directly at mario (at) sgizmo {dot} com with your words of wisdom. I’m traveling light, but ready for anything day or night.

The details are below. Please RSVP if you think you’ll be able to attend!

Date: Monday, October 4th

Time: Happy Hour – 6PM-7PM

Place: Duckworth’s Grill and Bar – 560 River Hwy, Mooresville, NC 28117

RSVP: Here

I hope all our North Carolinians make it!

The schedule and RSVP’s for the individual meet ups are below:

• Portland, Oregon: Friday, June 25th – RSVP
• Blacksburg, VA: Friday, June 25th – RSVP
• Herndon, VA: Monday, June 28th – RSVP
• Chicago, Illinois: Tuesday, July 6 – RSVP

If you’re in any of those areas, we’d love for you to come out, meet you, and have lunch on us! If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brittany@sgizmo.com. Have a great weekend, everyone!

MailChimp is based in Atlanta, so we thought it would be fun if they came by and invited their users to join us as well. So if you have any burning SurveyGizmo questions or MailChimp questions and are in Atlanta, you’ll definitely want to stop by!

Below are the details and the RSVP. If you have any questions, let ‘em in the comments.

Please join us for a user meet up with MailChimp in Atlanta, Georgia

Place: Ormsby’s – 1170 Howell Mill Rd, Atlanta 30318
Date: Tuesday, June 8th
Time: Lunch – 12PM
Host: SurveyGizmo’s CEO & Co-Founder, Scott McDaniel
RSVP: Here

Please join us for the user meet up to:

• Ask any burning SurveyGizmo or MailChimp questions
• Learn what other users are doing and improve your techniques
• Connect with other SurveyGizmo users
• Ask for your favorite new features
• Have lunch on us!

Firstly, they told me that SurveyGizmo Customer Support rocks, rocks some more, and finally– it rocks! We love to hear when SurveyGizmo Support impresses you, since we work hard to be among the best in the business. So, thank you! In the same vein, I believe we could always be doing more to empower users with our online support, so we will look forward to everyone’s feedback as we continue to enhance our online tutorial system.

Secondly, it wasn’t widely known among the meetup participants that we offer Professional Services. Our Professional Services are for those of you who’d like a Survey Project built for you, or for those who have a survey software need not currently being met by our other plans. We can build your surveys for you, create custom reports, scripts, & question types, and integrate with in-house or third party systems. Learn more about our Professional Services here, and fill out a SurveyGizmo Professional Services Request to get a quote for your project.

It was great to see everyone that came out, we look forward to seeing you again soon. Lastly, if you ever get to the Grafton Street Pub, be sure to try their Toasted Chickpea Burger with yogurt and cucumber sauce; I highly recommend it!

Last Thursday I hosted a meetup of SurveyGizmo users In the New York metropolitan area. In a break with recent tradition, we did this one as a happy hour instead of lunch.

The topics flowed easily, and we didn’t even need the alcohol to lubricate the discussion. ;)

• Lots of questions about our upcoming new reporting system
• Very positive feedback about application speed since we migrated to a new server farm
• Interesting stories of how some of our clients are using the API
• Shoutouts to our always-awesome customer support team

There was also a lot of cross-discussion about everyone’s respective jobs and research projects. It’s always so interesting to hear about the various research areas people use SurveyGizmo for, and it gives us a great feeling to know that we’re helping them get the data they need to make good decisions.

We held the meetup at Vintage, a hip little bar in Midtown. It has a cozy area in the rear with couches and chairs, isn’t too loud and has a huge selection of martinis.

We had a fantastic turnout for our Kansas City user meetup at Fiorella’s Jack Stack BBQ. We had amazing food and even more amazing conversation. You can see the whole group that came out below. (Thank you Buck for sending over the picture)

A few topics of conversation that we covered in this meetup included:

• Having an area on the website for people who are doing presentations using SurveyGizmo to hand out discount codes to their audience at the end of their presentation.
• The ability to export individual questions to individual worksheets in an Excel doc.
• Text message polling
• Just to name a few

Again I had a fantastic time — wish I could hold one of these every week! I hope that everyone who attended got as much out of it as I did. Thank you again to everyone who came out.

The next meetup will be in New York and will be hosted by Derek, our VP of Business Development. If you’re going to be in the New York City area on Thursday, September 17 and would like to come, please fill out this survey so I can add you to the list.

Cheers!

~Brittany

Place: Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue
Address: 101 W. 22 St, Kansas City, MO 64108
Date: Friday, August 28th
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
RSVP: Please Click Here

Please join us for lunch to:

• Ask any burning SurveyGizmo questions
• Learn what other users are doing and improve your techniques
• Connect with other SurveyGizmo users
• Ask for your favorite new features
• Get a free lunch!

If you’re in the Kansas City area and would like to join us (we would love to have you!), please RSVP to this survey and we’ll reserve a spot for you! ]]> http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/on-our-way-to-kansas-city/feed/ 2 http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/back-from-chicago-full-of-ideas/ http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-blog/back-from-chicago-full-of-ideas/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:00:42 +0000 Brittany Heidtke http://www.surveygizmo.com/?p=5358 Read More »]]> Well I’m back from Chicago and rejuvenated thanks to a ton of great ideas and suggestions from our well attended user meetup lunch. We had a ton of food (seriously Mike Ditka’s restaurant gives you enough food to feed a family of five off of one entree) and great conversations. You can see a few of the people who attended below!

Here are just a few of the ideas and suggestions the Chicago users had for SurveyGizmo that will be added to our suggestion list:

• More video tutorials
• A monthly newsletter letting you know about features and updates
• New reporting types with t-tests and significance tests
• An easier to use spell check for your entire survey
• Some text and an action to “White list this email address” when you send out email invites

There were a whole bunch of other requests (too many to list right now), but they are all great ideas and we’ve already added them to the feature request list. So as soon as we get multiple requests for the same thing, that feature will be sent over to the Dev team to be developed and implemented. You could be seeing the above requests within SurveyGizmo at any time — So keep your eyes peeled!

I just want to thank everyone who attended the Chicago meet up. I had a fantastic time, and I hope you guys all did too.

Our next meet up will be in Kansas City next Friday, August 28th. We’ll be having lunch at Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue. So, if you’re in the Kansas City area and would like to come, send an email to brittany (at) sgizmo (dot) com and I’ll add you to our list.