We’re delighted to now let you pick your own local or toll-free phone number. The process couldn’t be easier: you describe the number you want to purchase by area code (or toll-free), click to see a list of what’s available, and buy the one you like. You may use this number immediately for inbound or outbound calling.

And it’s affordable; local and toll-free phone numbers cost only $3 per month. Use a phone number for just one month, or keep it for years.

But that’s not all! We’re also lowering the cost of inbound phone surveys to 10 cents per each 5 minutes of connection time (before, it was 25 cents per 5 minutes). Toll-free inbound calls will cost 20 cents per 5 minutes of connection time.

Now, you can afford to create a myriad of inbound surveys, each with its own phone number. Are you a small business owner interested in customer feedback? Print a phone number on the bottom of your receipts and signs, so people can call into your phone survey. Does your organization include members who don’t have access to a computer? Now they can participate by simply dialing your hotline. Teachers can use inbound surveys to collect information and ideas from parents… the list goes on and on. We’d love to hear your ideas, too, in the comments area.

But enough talk! Here’s a real-life example of a dial-in customer feedback hotline for Precision Polling.

Call (877) 775-5835

Click here to see the results. The survey is:

SECTION #1:
Hi, thanks for calling Precision Polling's customer feedback survey.

SECTION #2:
How did you hear about Precision Polling? Google search, Google ad, Friend
told you, Read an article, or Other? Press 1 for Google search. Press 2 for
Google ad. Press 3 for Friend told you. Press 4 for Read an article. Press 5
for Other.

SECTION #3:
Are you likely to use Precision Polling in the future? Yes, No, or Maybe? Press
1 for Yes. Press 2 for No. Press 3 for Maybe.

   BRANCH: If the respondent picks 2 then go to #5: Thank you for your feedback!
           Goodbye.

SECTION #4:
Great! What kinds of surveys might you do?  Customer satisfaction, Employee
surveys, Political research, Education, Engage to members of your organization,
or Other? Press 1 for Customer satisfaction. Press 2 for Employee surveys.
Press 3 for Political research. Press 4 for Education. Press 5 for Engage to
members of your organization. Press 6 for Other.

SECTION #5:
Thank you for your feedback! Goodbye.

Now, when you create a Precision Polling account, we’ll also setup a free SurveyMonkey account for you behind the scenes. Use the same username and password combination to log into both sites, and when you log into one, we’ll also automatically log you into the other.

Many Precision Polling users already use SurveyMonkey for running web surveys, and this change makes it seamless for them to use both. More importantly, this is a first step towards deeper tie ins between the two sites so you can get access to world class web surveys, and phone polls in one place.

All new accounts starting today will have access to this feature. If you’re an existing user, then please check your email; we sent you simple instructions on upgrading to take advantage of shared logins. If you have any questions, please drop us a note and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy.

We have big news: SurveyMonkey, the world leader in web surveys, has acquired Precision Polling! The deal was completed yesterday, and Precision Polling is now wholly owned and operated by SurveyMonkey LLC.

We are thrilled to be joining forces with SurveyMonkey. Not only are they pioneers in the research space, but they also share our vision: make it easy, fast, and affordable for people in every industry and across the world to gather the data they need to make better decisions. More importantly, this change means an even better Precision Polling experience for you. We’re bringing on a dedicated support team to give you world class support, and adding more members to our team so you get powerful new features faster than ever before. We will also be working on tying the two services together, so that you can go to one place for all your phone and web survey needs.

Of course, this is very exciting for us personally too. As a small team of two founders, we’ve worked very hard over the past year to build a product that people love to use. In a year, we’ve won two politics awards (Pollie and Rising Star) and served large national and local organizations. We will be joining the SurveyMonkey team, and continuing to build and grow Precision Polling.

You can continue to use the service as you did before, with the same great features, at the same affordable prices (except now, those of you in Washington state are no longer charged sales tax). We have updated our terms of use and privacy policy as part of the transition.

Thank you for your business, support, and feedback; we wouldn’t have gotten here without you.

Precision Polling was proud to sponsor the Open APIs for Government at San Francisco City Hall on Friday. Respected thought leaders like Mitch Kapor (our old boss at Xmarks), Tim O’Reilly, and Craig Newmark urged a mixed audience of government officials, entrepreneurs, and reporters to think “open” with their data. Twilio organized the event, and are now running a developer contest around Open APIs.

Drawing many lessons from the Open Source movement, the Open APIs movement encourages anyone with a body of potentially useful information to simply make it available, even if it’s not immediately clear what to do with it. Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts have shown time and time again an amazing ability to stitch together these various data sources in novel ways for the public good. This has included transit data, crime, potholes, broken streetlights, garbage, vandalism, and so on.

While Precision Polling isn’t a data source per se, we operate in the same spirit of democratizing access to actionable information. Our low cost structure and no setup fees make it possible for local governments, school districts, government agencies, and other similar public organizations to poll their constituents and make data-driven decisions. This is the other side of the Government 2.0 coin: improving the communication between government and its constituents through technology, and we’re proud to play a part in it.

At our booth during the event, we were delighted to run into a number of interesting folks from local government, non-profits, and public agencies who wanted to actively incorporate public opinion polling into their other data efforts. We’ll be sharing success in this space in the coming months, but in the meantime, let us know if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help!

Campaign & Elections’ Politics magazine today announced our CEO, Gaurav Oberoi, as one of the 2010 Rising Stars of Politics. One of the most prestigious honors in politics, the award goes to people 35 or under who have already made a significant mark in political 
consulting,
 campaigning
 or 
advocacy.

The magazine chose 15 Democrats, 15 Republicans and 11 nonpartisan leaders this year out of a pool of several hundred nominees. Gaurav was awarded one of the nonpartisan awards for his work on Precision Polling. Past Rising Stars include Karen Hughes, George Stephanopoulos, David Axelrod, Paul Begala, Donna Brazile, James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, and Laura Ingraham. The Rising Stars will be honored on June 12 in Washington D.C.

We’re honored and grateful for the recognition, it motivates us to work harder at reaching our goal: to make polling accessible to everyone, even the smallest of campaigns. It’s only been ten months since we started the company, but now with dozens of customers (including the DNC), validation from renowned pollsters (Mark Blumenthal), and two political awards under our belt (we also won a Pollie), we’re beginning to feel like we’re on the right track.

Once again, our thanks go to our customers for shaping the product into what it is today: an easy-to-use, fast, and affordable polling solution that helps consultants, pollsters, and campaign managers win races.

When folks are getting started with Precision Polling - or polling in general - the same questions keep coming up come up. How much will it cost? What is the best way to phrase my questions? How do retries work?

We’ve distilled our answers into a friendly FAQ that should guide you as you start using our system. Please let us know if you think of anything else that should be there, and we’ll be sure to add it.

Check out our brand new FAQ now!

To also share his expertise, we invited one of our friends (and a Precision Polling customer), a senior researcher at the The Washington Poll, to join us in presenting to the group.

The audience had lots of great questions, and all of us learned a good deal about polling and the role it plays in winning campaigns. We realized that there’s lots of useful information in the slides we put together, and so wanted to share them with you. If you’re interested in learning about: polling methodology, practical tips on polling, typical costs of polling, polling trends in campaigns, and more, please click on the images below to download the slide decks.

Our interface makes it easy to add a random variation. When editing your poll, just click on the new “variation” button, and a dialog pops up letting you provide an alternate phrasing. You may map between the variation’s options to the original answers (e.g. pressing “1″ in the original survey means “520 Bridge”, whereas pressing “2″ in a random variation might mean “520 bridge”). When you call in to record your survey, we will prompt you to record a variation just like any other question, e.g. “Please record question 2 with variation 1 at the beep..”

When someone takes a poll, we automatically pick between the original question and any random variations. For example, if a question has two random variations, one third of people will hear the original verison; one third will hear variation #1, and one third will hear variation #2. Later, when you dump your raw results, we will tell you who heard which variation.

Detect Answering Machines?

When running outbound calls, you can now pick whether or not to perform answering machine detection. Answering machine detection helps to improve accuracy in results about whether it was a person or machine who picked up, but it typically adds a 2-5 second pause at the start of your survey. If you don’t need to do this, you can now turn it off.

Faster Poll Editing

We made a lot of improvements on the poll editing page to make it much snappier and more responsive. You’ll love how much faster it is to get started and make changes!

Delete Past Polls

You can now delete any past poll. This is especially useful for getting rid of test surveys and uncluttering your dashboard. Don’t worry; we archived polls for several days before deleting them from our database, so you won’t accidentally lose valuable data.

Delete Phone Lists

Likewise, you can delete phone lists that you’re no longer using.

The data released on this topic (especially in the wake of the 2008 election) suggests that in practice, automated polling is just as accurate at predicting election results as live-interviewer polls (and in many cases, more accurate). This methodology is well on its way to acceptance by mainstream research and media outlets.

Here are some resources on this topic:

1. AAPOR Report

Probably the most authoritative source is a study of the methodology of primary polls in 2008 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research in which they state:

All of the final pre-primary polls were conducted by telephone, using either CATI or IVR systems. We found no evidence that one approach consistently out-performed the other – that is, the polls using CATI or IVR were about equally accurate. – PAGE 30

And:

The use of either computerized telephone interviewing (CATI) techniques or interactive voice response (IVR) techniques made no difference to the accuracy of estimates. – PAGE 77

2. Mark Blumental

Mark is an editor at Pollster.com who regularly covers automated polls. A definitive article is:

In Defense of Automated Surveys, September 2009

He also wrote this report for Public Opinion Quarterly. It includes a discussion of IVR with several examples and quotes supporting it.

Here’s a blurb from one of his other articles:

As PPP’s Tom Jensen noted earlier this week, analyses conducted by the National Council on Public Polls (in 2004), AAPOR’s Ad Hoc Committee on Presidential Primary Polling (2008), and the Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik all found that automated polls performed about as well as live interviewer surveys in terms of their final poll accuracy. To that list I can add two papers presented at last week’s AAPOR conference (one by Harvard’s Chase Harrison and Farleigh Dickinson Unversity’s Krista Jenkins and Peter Woolley) and papers on prior conferences on poll conducted from 2002 to 2006 (by Joel Bloom and Charles Franklin and yours truly). All of these assessed poll conducted in the final weeks or months of the campaign and saw no significant difference between automated and live interviewer polls in terms of their accuracy.

He also reports on their gaining prominence back in 2006:

He’s not kidding. Of the 1,031 poll results logged into the Pollster.com database so far in the 2006 cycle from statewide races for Senate and Governor, more than half (55%) have been done by automated pollsters Rasmussen Reports, SurveyUSA or over the Internet by Zogby International. And that does not count the surveys conducted once a month by SurveyUSA in all 50 states (450 so far this year alone). Nor does it count the automated surveys recently conducted in 30 congressional districts by Constituent Dynamics and RT Strategies.

3. Wall Street Journal

The Journal wrote an excellent article on the use of automated polling for the 2008 presidential campaign, Press 1 for McCain, 2 for Obama (Aug 2008). They discuss the criticisms of automated polling, but also bring up the strengths that put it on equal footing with live interviews.

Recorded polls, however, offer several advantages… Politicians’ names are pronounced correctly and identically each time, and responses entered correctly are recorded correctly.

There also is evidence that automated polls inspire honesty, particularly on sensitive topics. Stephen Blumberg, who conducts polls for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that in tests, people responding with touch tones instead of by voice were more likely to admit they had multiple sex partners, or traded sex for money or drugs.

See the author’s companion blog post.

4. Business Wire

In this November 2004 article, they find an IVR pollster (Survey USA) as having the highest accuracy of 104 polling firms.