The QuestionPro Blog

Lots of great presentations today at the CASRO Technology conference. One of the themes today has been SMS marketing and research. I culled out some interesting notes from all the talks that I thought you might enjoy:

-Mobile phone market is exploding (presented with too many slides to make the point)
-23% of US mobile subscribers say they have been exposed to adverts or marketing on their phone
-Only way to reach people that don't have a landline (duh)
-Phones are deeply personal - must be careful about contacting people
-95% of phones can receive SMS/text messaging
-SMS can be used for: alerts, info, messages, coupons, surveys
-SMS research always has faster response times
-Better to execute short SMS interviews over time vs long surveys over short time
-Data plans are expensive and requires special hardware thus explains 20% mobile web adoption rate

We've integrated SMS polling within MicroPoll.com for some time now. Its interesting to see the myriad of SMS market research projects that companies have implemented already. Do you have a need for some type of SMS research? Is there a particular feature related to SMS research that you need or are unable to find? Submit an idea today - we'd love to hear your SMS related feedback/ideas.

We recently upgraded the Email List Management system to support multilingual custom variables (Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German etc).



The system supported the upload of multilingual custom variables via the web interface, but was not able to handle multilingual custom variables uploaded via a CSV file.



After doing some research, we found out that the CSV file import simply could not be used to upload multilingual custom variables.



The solution; we enhanced the import function to handle Excel files. This solution killed two birds with one stone; 1. Excel import is actually very convenient format for users 2. Solved the multilingual custom variables upload issue.

When conducting a survey -- there are a broad set of "Do's" and "Don'ts" -- Keep in mind that you are asking your customers, users or partners to spend their time and give you feedback. Think about this for a minute -- you are asking someone to spend their time and give feedback for YOU -- In most cases without any real tangible and immediate benefit for them.

One of the easiest way to build confidence for users to spend 10/20 minutes of their time is to put together a "Intro" page that describes the survey, explains why you are soliciting feedback and explains your privacy policy and statement.

What are the key messages you want to convey in your INTRO page? Explain to your users:

1. WHY are you conducting the survey? To better understand opinions? Is there a deadline?
   
2. How LONG will this survey take? You are asking users to spend time -- Have you ever asked someone to spend time with you, without telling them how long?
3. Your PRIVACY STATEMENT - Who will have access to the data? Is the data anonymous? Will the privacy be protected?
4. Explain clearly any INCENTIVES that you may be planning on giving. If you have images, insert an image of the incentive -- This will increase the response rate and participation rate.
5. Finally, have clear instructions on WHAT TO DO NEXT. Make it clear that the user has to hit "Continue" or the submit button in order to participate. Explain what to do if users do not want to participate.
   

A small community here in Seattle of tech geeks are working hard to plan their upcoming conference. They are called the "Six Hour Startup" -- the basic premise is - they want to create a startup -- you guessed it -- IN SIX HOURS.

The Six Hour Startup (or SHS) is a tight knit groups of technology geeks, design dudes, marketing folks that get together once a month (on a Saturday) and launch a new startup!

They are currently trying out IdeaScale -- Check out some ideas that people have proposed:

• http://sixhourstartup.ideascale.com

• http://www.ideascale.com

I still see lots of if ideas for QuestionPro coming into my inbox. While we have our own tracking system for reviewing ideas internally, I find myself going to our own IdeaScale portal and checking for new ideas there instead. I love seeing our customers make suggestions that I haven't even had the time to think about!

Got an idea for QuestionPro? Submit it today at http://questionpro.ideascale.com.

Everyone wants to do branching, but it can be a little confusing to figure out! We threw together a quick help video that should clear up a lot of the confusion. Check it out on our YouTube Channel, or below.

One of the most elegant features within QuestionPro is its collaborative nature. Via dashboard and sub accounts, an organization can control how results are shared and to whom. Unfortunately, it takes a little while for people to understand how powerful it is. We've published a video piece that provides a great overview (below).

We are constantly trying to dream up new ways to help people create powerful surveys, quickly and easily (QuestionPro for Dummies, help articles, blog, etc). Our latest incarnation is the QuestionPro Training Video Series.

We've taken some of our most requested help items, and had our screen-casting team start producing a video walk through of each topic. You'll start seeing these embedded right in with our help articles, as well as available as a YouTube channel! So tune in now and enjoy!

I get lots of questions that fly by about different URL options for surveys. At QuestionPro, we support all different types of "URL Branding" options, depending on the extent of your needs (and how much technical jargon you can handle).

Default URL

To start, we have the default URL. Each survey in QuestionPro is assigned a unique survey ID, which you'll see in the unique URL that is automatically created for each survey. The default URL for a survey looks as follows:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=XXXXXX

Where XXXXXX is your unique Survey ID. More discussion on that here.

Short URL

The default URL is a bit lengthy and when you are mailing the links (snail mail) or giving the links on phone, its tedious to get the URL right. To make survey distribution even easier we provide the Short URL option. For each survey in QuestionPro you can set up a unique Short URL. For example:

http://demo.questionpro.com

http://mysurvey.questionpro.com

More info on creating short URLs here.

Custom URL Branding (aka CNAME or sub-domain redirect)

QuestionPro also provides a completely branded solution. The Custom URL Branding option allows you to pick a URL (or use an existing domain/sub-domain) for all your survey initiatives. So instead of the URL being from QuestionPro.com, you can make it look like its coming from your organization, but still host the survey with our tools. For example:

http://surveys.mycompany.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=XXXXXX

Note: with the Custom URL option, you will be unable to use SSL in your surveys (this is a limitation of SSL technology). More info on Custom URL branding here.

Once again this year, QuestionPro donated 1% of our gross revenues to different charitable organizations. The 1% donation is similar to 1% for The Planet although we've opted to let everyone at the company choose an organization whose cause they believe in. Many of these causes aren't necessarily environmental in nature, but they are certainly meaningful nonetheless. This year, charitable groups, ranging from the Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org) to Alzheimers.org saw a donation from our team.

One of the hardest things about having a loyal customer/fan base using your software, is that it can be a bit bumpy trying to make UI enhancements. On one end, you want to address concerns that a new user might have when first introduced to the system (aka, "non-intuitive UI"). However, one will soon find that balancing the former without upsetting your current user base can leave the road to innovation and change quite bumpy.

That being said we bring you the new and improved, AJAX powered, question wizard! Now you can add questions faster than a speeding bullet, tweak questions in a flash, even reference recently used scales like butter! We are very excited to offer a much faster and more intuitive way to churn out surveys and drive results.

As I mentioned, the road can get bumpy. Its a little nerve racking when you click on "Add Question" and a flashy AJAX window pops up instead of the old clunky wizard. Never fear, our rock-star support team is here! They've been busy soothing our customers nerves, pointing the veteran survey builder to the proper screen to create an extraction question, tweak a validation, or add a scale to a question.

We hope you enjoy the new question wizard - we continue to work hard to make survey building as easy as possible.

TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach & Frequency) analysis is a powerful yet simple tool that can help you determine "optimal" solutions for problems like:

• I have a budget for 3 out of 12 marketing ideas. What three should I pick, that will give me maximum reach and help as many stakeholders as possible?
• I have 12 features for my product, but only have time to develop 5 of them. Which 5 of them should I pick?
• I have a matrix question that asks users to rate satisfaction on a series of items -- I would like to pick 3 out of the 10 to "focus" on -- Which 3 should I pick?
  

1. Every one attending will get a free copy of QuestionPro for Dummies (OK - I know you really don't need to attend the webinar to get the book!)
2. One random user will get a Free Enterprise QuestionPro License (if you are not an enterprise customer already.)
3. Three random users will get the Corporate License (for free -- obviously)

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in fairly high-level enhancements, we overlook some fairly obvious ones. The other day I needed to delete a lot of questions (about 30) in a survey and it occurred to us that a simple multiple select option in the survey outline would be easier! In a few days, check out your survey outline to try it out.

Many a times a customer would have a long survey and would want to display only one question per page. Obviously possible, but you would need to place a page break after every question which is time consuming. So we thought of a solution and came up with the Interactive Display Mode. Now instead of adding page breaks to your survey all you need to do is go to Edit Survey >> Randomization Options >> Interactive Display Mode and select the one question/page option.

After that we had one more barrier: if we have respondents select one question per page and the survey is lengthy we would have frustrated respondents as they will have to keep selecting the answer option and clicking on continue. At this point we enhanced the one question/page so that as soon as the respondent would select the answer option the survey will auto submit and move forward.

QuestionPro is working on many more Interactive Display modes and as soon as we go live with anything new we will keep every one posted.

Cheers

Aditya

Rob Hoehn will be hosting the next webinar on Thursday, March 6, 2008 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST

• Click Here to Register

• http://blog.questionpro.com (See to the right for the email signup box)

We are launching a new series of blog entries for best practice solutions for common problems. These are a little more in-depth than the standard knowledge base/help that QuestionPro has.

Here is the first one:

Survey On Multiple Websites : Issues, Analysis and Implementation

Problem Statement:

I have multiple websites and I would like to conduct a survey (popup, link) on all those sites. I want to however be able to analyze the data on a per-website basis -- So I can view the stats for a particular site, as well as view the aggregate data across all the sites. What is the best way I can achieve this? The survey itself (structure, questions) is exactly the same.

Solution Overview:
The key here is that the survey structure is the same. If you have the exact same survey structure for the survey, you can use Custom Variables in the URL to identify which link users are clicking on and tag the data as it is collected with the custom variables.

Implementation Details:

Use the "Custom Variable" option within QuestionPro. With QuestionPro
every survey has a unique URL. Its something like: (xxx is the unique
identifier for your survey)

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=xxx

Now, you can also add custom parameters to the URL that also get
captured when someone takes the survey by clicking on the link. For
example:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=xxx&custom1=flowers.com

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=xxx&custom1=roses.com

Now both the links lead to the same survey (identified by xxx), but in one case, the
value "flowers.com" and the other case "roses.com" will be captured
along with the data.

The good news is that QuestionPro provides for easy segmentation
based on Custom Variables.

Simply go to the "Grouping/Segmentation"
section and create data sets for the segment you want to analyze. Use the System Variable Grouping screen to create a data segment where (custom1=flowers.com) and another data segment for custom1=roses.com.

Screenshot:

You can even separate multiple values to do aggregation. For example of you had 40 websites/URLs and you wanted to collate 10 of them together and view the analysis for the 10 of them (as a single unit) you can separate them out with commas and create a data segment for the 10 of them:

Another option is to use the Banner Table analysis to automatically compare all the data (with the aggregate data) for each unique value of a custom variables.

Screenshot:

This will produce an excel report analyzing the data for each data segment and compare that to the overall data.

References:

Custom Variables
http://www.questionpro.com//help/131.html

Detailed Help on System Variable/Custom Variable Grouping/Segmentation
http://www.questionpro.com/help/301-inline.html

Detailed Help on Automatic Banner/Pivot Tables:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/301-inline.html

Here is a great workshop that I would highly recommend if you are new
to online surveying. I have known Fred Van Bennekom professionally over
the last couple of years.

Direct Quote from Fred:

"Success in a survey project is a challenge under any circumstances,
but a lack of solid background about surveying practices may doom the
project to provide useless or misleading information.  While the many
new articles on my website will help you understand portions of a
survey project, my Survey Design & Data Analysis Workshops will help
you achieve your survey program goals by giving you the critical
knowledge about surveying best practices – plus, you’ll get a review
of your survey questionnaire, delivering immediate value."

His next workshop offerings are:

  * March 5-7, Dallas Texas

  * April 14-16, Crystal City, VA (just outside Wash. DC)

  * May 7-9, Santa Clara, CA (near San Jose)

If you want to get in touch with Fred follow this link below:
http://www.greatbrook.com/events.htm

If you end up signing up for the workshop, make sure you mention that you
got his info via. the QuestionPro blog. You'll get a discount!

PS: QuestionPro DOES NOT get any kickbacks if you signup for the workshop.

If you provide training/consulting/workshop services for online surveys, please feel free to contact me if you are hosting an event, and I'll post details on the blog. To get in touch with me, please use this email address:

blog-response [at] surveyanalytics [dot] com

Thanks to a little nudge from a couple of our customers, we've made some improvements to the Action Alert system:
major areas of the system :

Here are the details:


Ability to create multiple alerts
Earlier the system had a limitation of only one alert per survey. This limitation has been removed. You can now create multiple alerts for the same survey.




Action Alert Email Body
The emails that go out themselves are formatted better and are far more presentable than the earlier ones. This is a little tricky because unlike browsers, different email clients (Outlook,Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) usually modify the HTML/Content of the email before presenting it to the users. This makes it a little more challenging to find the lowest common denominator and make sure that the email looks good on all these platforms.

Couple of quick export enhancements that have gone online over the last couple of days:

PowerPoint Export:

Open Ended Comments
Ability to specify if you want the Open-Ended Text comments as part of the download. This allows you to create a single comprehensive PPT file that has  both the analytical data  as well as the open-ended text data. There is still the issue of the a large number of comments in a single slide. At this point, we are putting all the comment data in a single slide. In the future we'll probably have an option to break the data into multiple slides. This does however increase the size of the PPT file considerably.



PowerPoint Templates:
We've included a standard set of PPT templates that you can use. Choose any template and the PPT file will use that template.

In the future we envision allowing for uploading a PPT template file and the system defaults to a custom template that you've uploaded.






Word Export:
We've also added in the option to download the presentation data in Word format. This becomes useful if you have a lot of open-ended text data. The Word document is a much better solution than the PPT file.





Detailed help for these upgrades are available here:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/372.html

OK, we admit it -- This functionality has been in "Coming Soon" mode for almost six months now. We finally managed to put some development resources into the email individual report functionality to get it done.


What we have so far:
Using the Response Editor, when viewing an individual response, you can quickly email it to someone else (or yourself)

When is it typically used?
Typically this could be used to send a copy of the response (with verbatim comments) to your boss or a stakeholder.

What is next in the pipeline?
The current plan is to enable the same report in multiple standard formats (PDF, Word etc.) This is in the works and should be released soon.


Screenshot:

We have expanded our logic/tools to include dynamic (inline/javascript) based comment boxes based on logic. The typical use-case is when you want to ask the user for open-ended text comments if they choose a particular option (or give you a low score.)

In the past, most users did this with the help of branching and skip logic. We've now added in the capability to do this _without_ going through the branching/skip logic tool.

Screenshot:



Detailed Help:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/471.html

As many of you have noticed (and commented) we've made some significant changes and updates to the email list management interface for survey delivery. Most of it is centered around usability but there are some functions that have been added:

What we've launched so far:

Automatic Duplicated checking and removal
Ability to View/Download Specific Email Addresses based on Status(Bounced/Active/Unsubscribe)
On-Click removal of Bounced and Duplicate email addreses

Screenshot:

Bulk Unsubscribe Option
When users email you personally to take them off the email list

Automated Import Tool:
Use this option if you have a different system of collecting email addresses and you'd like to integrate the upload of emails into QuestionPro. Simply send a pre-formatted CSV file as an attachment to a specified email address, and the QuestionPro system will do the rest -- Upload emails into the email list, and send out the survey to all of them.

Screenshot:

Where we are headed:
We'll be launching an expanded set of functionality by the end of the year, to accommodate the following:

• List Signup Widget (A Widget that you can post on site for easy email address collection)
• List Signup Page (A HTML Page, hosted by QuestionPro) for enabling users to directly signup with your list.
• Double-Opt-In verification and confirmation.

We are beta-testing a new Visualization (Logic/Flowchart) library to see how the branching logic is setup on a survey. To view the logic for your survey :

Detailed Help:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/456.html

We've added in a new feature into the "Draft/Collaboration" mode. The ability to add visual sticky notes to the survey. This feature is enabled when the survey is in "Draft/Collaboration" mode.

To learn more about Draft/Collaboration mode visit:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/391.html

Screenshot:

Since our inception back in 2002, we've strongly believed in partnering with academic institutions to bring about fresh ideas to QuestionPro. I wanted to highlight some of the universities that have taken advantage of our University Sponsorship Program:

Arkanas Tech University
http://research.atu.edu/questionpro.htm

University of Wisconsin (Madison)
http://www.bus.wisc.edu/marketing/questionpro.asp

California School of International Management
http://www.csim.edu/questionpro.htm

Oklahoma Baptist University
http://www.okbu.edu/academics/qpro.html

University of South Florida (St. Pertersburg)
http://www.stpt.usf.edu/ir/QuestionPro.htm

If your university wishes to enroll in the the program, please send them this link:

http://www.questionpro.com/corporate-sponsorship

One of the requests we've had from customers to enhance the System Variable based Grouping to include multiple criteria for a particular custom variable.

This is needed in cases where the custom variable is too granular. For example if the custom variable you are tracking is a Customer Zip Code, and you need to "roll" up data for a particular set of zip codes you can do that with this enhancement.

Screenshot:

Detailed Help Item:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/197.html

We are currently beta-testing two new tools that has been in the radar for quite some time:

1. A MS Word Importing Tool -- Automatically imports a survey in MS Word into QuestionPro.
2. A Branching Logic visualization tool.

Both these tools are in Beta mode.

To learn more about the MS Word Importing too, visit:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/454.html

To find out more about the Logic Visialization (Flowchart) tool goto:
Login->Edit Survey->Branching/Logic (Bottom Left Navigation)

It's been a while since we posted some details about our up and coming features -- So here it goes. We're planning on providing a single-click solution for providing Amazon.com gift coupons to your survey participants.

Needless to say, survey incentives are the easiest and smartest way to increase your response rates to your surveys. If you look at it from a puristic cost/benefit model (and the No-Free-Lunch model) you need to compensate your participants in some way for their time.

Many of our customers go with a raffle/pick-a-winner mechanism -- while this is better than nothing, most people are wary of such schemes and generally do not trust them at all.

The Amazon Gift Couple Solution
Amazon.com has a existing program whereby you can purchase $5000 worth of gift certificates (in any denomination -- $5, $10 or $20 etc.) and they essentially give you an Excel file with the 13 digit alphanumeric codes (coupons) that can be used as cash on Amazon.com.

Why Amazon?
Very simple -- Its the same as cash -- with easy and electronic fulfillment. Amazon sells everything from baby diapers to books to motorcycles!

What about security -- Multiple respondents, forwarding to a friend etc.?
A lot of it depends upon how the survey is setup. We obviously strongly recommend that ABBS (Anti-Ballot-Box-Stuffing) options be enabled on surveys that give out automatic coupons. We also will be putting in place an email verification mechanism - this will be done so that the gift coupon can be emailed to the respondent. We'll obviously reject duplicate email addresses and multiple email addresses from the same IP etc.

Pilot Program
This Amazon Coupon integration is a new feature and if you/your company is interested in participating with is on a pilot project, we would love to do a joint project with you. If you are planning to launch a survey in the next month (August 2007 time frame) please contact me and we'll setup a pilot project with the coupon integration on your survey.

Couple of quick/basic requirements:
1) Payment for the Gift Coupons must be made by Check before the launch of the project.
2) The current denomination for the gift certificates is $5.
3) The minimum for the pilot project is 200 coupons -- Basically $1000.
4) The project must be launched in the August 2007 time frame.
5) Must have a QuestionPro Corporate or Enterprise License.

If you have a project in mind that can fit the above requirements please feel free to contact me directly. Please send an email to :

blog-response [at] surveyanalytics [dot] com

We just launched a hot new tool for data-validation -- The "Reference Data" question type.

The Reference Data Question Type is used to collect/validate data against "standardized" databases -- for example US Zip Codes.

For example, if you wanted to ask users their Zip Code and wanted to validate (to make sure that the data entered is correct) against the standard US Postal Service Zip Code database you can use the Reference Data question type for this.

We've currently integrated with :

US Zip Code (Postal Service)
Canadian Postal Codes
Australian Post Codes

It turns out that for some countries this data is actually NOT in the public domain. In the UK the Royal Post has a copyright on this data and sells is commercially. The licensing of the data is too complicated for us to even deal with it.

Here is a survey that uses the Zip Code:

http://greenhousing.questionpro.com

References:

Reference Data Question Type
http://www.questionpro.com/help/399.html