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The notion that fun increases participation is not new. How many times in your career have you been bribed to attend a meeting with food? Ok–probably enough to know that pizza does not cancel out tedium completely, however, we keep trying to make everything more enjoyable for ourselves by mediating looming unpleasantness when it threatens us. However, this video from TheFunTheory.com goes further–it speaks to the challenge of compelling people to make a healthier choice by making the beneficial choice more fun.

Even more, how can we make building surveys more fun for you?

How can we make building surveys more like playing, and less like work?

Have a think, and enjoy your weekend!

While we’re answering the phones, juggling support tickets, playing with Lego models, and building awesome survey software, we’re also thinking about how we could improve the blog. So, we’d like to start writing an ongoing series of posts about SurveyGizmo Tips, Tricks + Hacks, where we blog about everything from new SurveyGizmo features, to creative uses of the survey software, to reminders about neat tricks the software can do, and other good things that will benefit you, the ever-deserving populous.

We’ll find ideas for this series from trends in support tickets, calls, and other various inputs–but we should also just ask! So, let us know:

What would you like to hear about?

Feel free to leave a comment, @reply on our Twitter feed, leave a shout on our Facebook page, or go to this neat-o SurveyGizmo poll to submit an idea.

Thank you. We’re listening.

Chad! And his survey-logic visualizer!

His tool for visualizing survey logic impressed us all, so he received the coveted Lego AT-AT. Congratulations, Chad!

When the dust cleared, and Lab Week concluded, the SurveyGizmo employees had to choose between an awesome interactive tutorial system, a super new mascot, a rad global spellcheck, and a stellar tool for visualizing survey logic. We all hated to pick a favorite, since each project was so well executed, and each will add quite a bit of awesome to the SurveyGizmo application. Though, in the end, someone had to prevail, and we’re glad Chad was gracious enough to bring the assembled AT-AT back to the office so we can all play with it!

Chad’s (now award-winning) survey logic viewer will make it easier for everyone to troubleshoot advanced and simple survey logic alike. So, congratulations to him, and to the whole team for their hard work and great results.

Look for each of their projects in a SurveyGizmo release sometime in the future!

Two weeks ago Christian Vanek, one of our co-founders, attended The Market Research Event put on by IIR (Institute for International Research) in Las Vegas. He came back with a number of amazing take-aways, and one of the most significant was within the last year the market research community has embraced using online social communities in their research. In particular, the way they are used as cost saving techniques during these economic times. This lit the fire on our collective behinds to roll out some social network integration projects.

The Twitter integration started the ball rolling, and we just kept on going. We’re excited to announce that we now have a full-fledged Facebook Integration!

What can you do with the Facebook Integration?

We wanted to make the integration as easy as possible for you to send surveys to your friends and to get your surveys to go viral. So with the Facebook integration, you can:

• Send surveys to your friends
• Allow your friends to forward your surveys to their friends
• Make your survey public to anyone who has the SurveyGizmo Facebook application installed
• Post your survey to your Facebook wall, so everyone who reads your wall can see it & take it

Those are all options available to you with the Facebook integration. If you don’t want to make your survey public, you don’t have to. If you only want the people you invite to take your survey, you can do that as well.

It’s extremely flexible, and basically gives you a free panel company of your own to work with. How cool is that!?!?

All you need to do to get started sending surveys through Facebook is head over to http://apps.facebook.com/surveygizmo and link up your already existing SurveyGizmo account to your Facebook account. It’s as simple as that.

You’ll be able to see your surveys inside of the Facebook app, and then you can send them out to your friends.

Also, from within your SurveyGizmo account, you’ll be able to publish your surveys directly to your Facebook wall and make your survey public to everyone who has the application downloaded and/or allow it to be friend to friend forwardable.

We hope you enjoy using it as much as the staff here has! And while you’re there, why not become a fan of SurveyGizmo?

Today I spoke with Derek Scruggs, SurveyGizmo’s VP of Sales and Business Development, about attending Connections ‘09, The ExactTarget User Conference. Held this year on October 13-15th, Connections is a conference for worldwide partners of ExactTarget, attracting a cosmopolitan crowd to the Indianapolis area, which charms natives and foreigners alike with its midwestern appeal. According to Derek, it was a very well organized, well-run event, and he even got to see some of our Indy customers at an informal SurveyGizmo meetup!

For Derek and for SurveyGizmo, Connections reaffirmed the value of product integration. Many of the conversations that went on at the conference mirrored those that have been taking place in the industry for awhile, like customer engagement, and customer retention, with a major addition to the discourse: the importance of APIs and product integration.

ExactTarget was SurveyGizmo’s first product integration partner, and today we continue to move towards embracing similar partnerships and integrations, with services like iModerate, The Sample Network, StreamSend, and our most recent partnership with MailChimp. Since I believe users will eventually expect all of their favorite web applications and technologies to work together seamlessly, SurveyGizmo is doing its part to contribute to the brighter future of total integration with these, and other future partnerships.

Some of the people Derek enjoyed getting in touch with were Tom Needy of Leisure Trends Groups, and the cool guys over at FanMail. We hope to see you next year at Connections 2010!

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!

Once SurveyGizmo Lab Week is completed next Thursday, all SurveyGizmo employees will cast their votes for the best project. The winner will receive the highly coveted prize, chosen by the development team: a Lego Motorized Walking AT-AT™!  Pew pew!

Now, let’s meet the contenders. In no particular order,

Joseph West is building a Survey-wide Spellcheck (utilizing the GNU Aspell library) with multiple language support. This spell check will function much like Search and Replace, checking the spelling in pages, questions, reports, and more.  It then displays the misspellings and offers suggestions for each word. The initial version will simply display the suggestions, but streamlined replacement functionality will be added over time to make it easier to replace any word with one of the suggestions, or with something you type in yourself.

Jean-Francois Hardy is working on a new interactive tutorial system. Unlike our written tutorials, it will teach you how to use SurveyGizmo by performing various tasks. It will present a description of what needs to be done and why, and then highlight the areas on the screen where the step should be performed. The tutorials will walk you through commonly-requested support questions, and teach you new things about SurveyGizmo in real-time, from within your own account.

Chad Shinsato is working on a page jumping logic analyzer. This tool will analyze your default, simple and advanced page jumping logic and display all the possible page paths that your survey takers can take, allowing you to easily debug issues in your survey.

Finally, Jase Smith is working on creating a SurveyGizmo mascot. Jase tells us that it’s been a fun challenge to come up with a character that fits the SurveyGizmo persona. With his life-long love for comic books, cartoons, and anime style art, we are sure he’ll come up with something everyone will love!

Credit also goes to rock-star CTO Christian Vanek, who has heroically covered all of the technical support during SurveyGizmo Lab Week, allowing the development team to fully dedicate their efforts to their projects.

Best of luck, guys! And, while one of these projects will be voted “best” on October 22, ultimately we feel as though all of our users win!

I’m new to SurveyGizmo, and I’m excited to join the ongoing effort to make your life easier–at least the part which concerns surveys! In the past I’ve worked on a variety of web technologies: from a location-based web and mobile application, to a music-focused social network, and currently, survey software at SurveyGizmo. Unofficially, I blog, microblog, and obsess over social media and the novel ways it connects us online.

Though these technologies may seem unrelated, the commonality is that they concern themselves with organizing data in new and exciting ways. I have a great love and respect for data, and the urgent need for more and better information, especially when it concerns making sense of the desires of your users. Since meeting the needs of your users is mutually satisfying, we at SurveyGizmo aim to give you advanced tools to gather the information you want, and then provide killer support to make your experience outstanding.

But before satisfaction, usually comes effort. So, just how easy was it to set up my first SurveyGizmo survey?

I started by clicking the friendly orange Free Trial button on the SurveyGizmo home page. On the next page, I chose the Personal plan since I am a blogger, one of the types of users suggested for that account option. Though, I noticed also that I could have a 14 Day Free Trial for any account type, so whether it’s Personal, Pro or Enterprise, I could access all of the features for a thorough test-drive. Additionally, I didn’t have to provide a credit card to start my survey software experience, which meant no digging through my purse before I even got to do anything, and no fear of getting charged after 14 days.

Next, I completed my registration and signed into my dashboard, and clicked Create Survey to do just that. As a test, I created some questions related to the inane internet silliness that my blog readers are used to. I briefly explored the helpful survey templates that are available on the new survey screen, and then chose to create my own, with the default look and feel. For the next few moments, I thought of some questions, added them, saved, and then published my first survey! I then chose the iFrame method to embed it into my site, and ten minutes later, my first survey was in the wild.

Finally, I tweeted the survey, and got a few people to take it. The best part was watching the results come in, real-time. As I watched the responses from the survey summary area, my craving for data was gratified! So, as one of the newest members of the SurveyGizmo team, I am proud to be part of a company that is obsessed with your ongoing satisfaction. I hope to help make your experience with our survey software as fulfilling as possible. Let us know what we can do for you today!

I’ve been doing survey design and market research for 25 years and I’m still amazed when I’m asked: “How many responses do I need to make my study ‘statistically significant’?” Hearing those words “statistically significant” in a market research context always confuses me. My usual response is “What exactly do you mean by that?” I either get a blank stare or a variety of responses, but most people are intending to say “You know, ‘statistically significant,’ the magic label that makes my results better.”

So what’s the confusion?

• A survey can’t be “statistically significant,” nor can a certain number of responses. Only a test statistic (e.g., a calculated statistical quantity) can be statistically significant.
• To a statistician “statistically significant” has a very particular meaning related to hypothesis testing requiring a specific set of assumptions which are rarely if ever true in a market research setting.
• Researchers aren’t asking about the significance of the results in the context of their objectives. This should be their main focus.

Let’s take a closer look:

For example, suppose someone comes to me for help with a survey to test the market’s preferences for skin care products. Often the first question they ask me is how many responses are needed to get “statistically significant” results. That is where the confusion starts, because that question only makes sense in the context of a statistical hypothesis test. A survey may involve many hypotheses that we want to test.

A statistical hypothesis test requires both a hypothesis: women buy more skin care products than men, and a test statistic: the percent of women who buy skin care products minus the percent of men who buy skin care products. Now we can ask if the test statistic (the difference between the two percentages) is “statistically significant.” That’s a legitimate question. A more meaningful question might be whether the difference is “practically significant.”

Practical significance: A calculated difference is practically significant if the actual difference it is estimating will affect a decision to be made. (Should we focus more marketing dollars on women than we do on men?)

Statistical significance depends on the sample size. A difference of 3% (58% for women minus 55% for men) can be statistically significant if the sample size is big enough, but it may not be practically significant. 3% hardly seems big enough to warrant focusing on one market over the other.

A difference of 30% (65% for women minus 35% for men) may be practically significant (i.e., warrant a decision to focus more dollars on the women’s market) but if the difference isn’t statistically significant (that depends on sample size) then you can’t be sure the difference you see (30%) is real, so you either need to get more data or treat the two groups as the same.

There are additional statistical issues with statistical significance that I haven’t addressed here, such as all the assumptions needed to perform the testing correctly. The assumptions of normally distributed data and 100% response rates are rarely, if ever, met in a market research setting. I’ll save those issues for another article.

So, how “statistically significant” is your survey data and is that the right question?

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. MailChimp’s 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 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.