826 National is a network of eight writing and tutoring centers across the U.S. that offers a variety of programs–free of charge–including after-school tutoring, in-schools projects, field trips, creative writing workshops, and student publishing opportunities. We provide under-resourced students, ages 6-18, with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills.

Our mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. Last year, our tutoring centers–located in Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC–served more than 31,000 students.

826NYC’s Storefront: Superhero Supply Store

We’re also well known for our whimsically themed physical spaces. Each of our centers is fronted by a wacky storefront to welcome in the community and raise funds for our programs, ranging from our original Pirate Supply Store in San Francisco to the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. and the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute.

Besides being carefully designed and academically rigorous, our writing programs are meant to stretch the boundaries of our students’ creative potential and help them explore their voice. Whether the task at hand is creating a diabolical archenemy for their main character during our signature Storytelling & Bookmaking workshop or investigating the origins of their family’s most treasured narratives during a publishing project or writing workshop, we engage our students through relevant and interesting explorations of how to powerfully communicate.

Since project-based learning is a key component of our model, all programming ends in a student-authored publication such as a chapbook, newspaper, magazine, podcast, film, or professionally bound book. The publishing component creates a lasting example of each student’s accomplishment, allowing them to share and remember their joy, pride, and hard work. Last year alone we published more than 1,000 individual student publications of various kinds.

Across our network of writing and tutoring centers, we use SurveyMonkey as a main component of our program evaluation strategy. Each year we assess our programs for quality and impact. Surveying the students, teachers, and parents about their experience with us is a key element of that cycle. We hope to impact our students’ lives both academically and from a youth development perspective, so we survey them about everything from their confidence and excitement in completing a writing assignment to their pride in becoming a published author.

826CHI (Chicago) student

We also like to investigate any shifts in our students’ attitudes toward reading, writing, homework, and literacy after experiencing our programs, which we measure by analyzing their responses on pre- and post-program surveys. Gathering data from parents and teachers helps us to confirm the student improvements we find and also gauge the effectiveness of programs in aiding families and schools.

Collecting this data is crucial to our work; not only does it help us ensure program quality and identify improvements each year, but it also provides necessary information for presentations to funders and partners. Each year we must garner immense support from different sources in order to keep our programs growing and free, and data obtained through these surveys plays a large role in that process.

SurveyMonkey makes it extremely easy and cost-effective for us to survey and analyze responses from hundreds of teachers and students each year. Some of the features we find most useful include their survey templates, results breakdown PDFs, and the user-friendly question design experience.

Thank you, SurveyMonkey, for helping us make this work possible.

We’d love to have you join in on the fun too! We’re always looking for volunteers and if you’re interested in helping support our students’ work with a donation, just click here.

Ryan Lewis is the Director of Research and Evaluation for 826 National.

Want to get involved in helping students master their communication and writing skills? Visit 826 National today!

Customer Spotlight on 826 National: How Surveys Help a Writing & Tutoring Nonprofit Support Student Success

In our last post, we talked about how to ask people about their own behavior, like how many times they’ve gone to the gym this week. Now we’ll show you how to ask people to tell you predictions of their own behavior, like how many times they plan on going to the gym next week.

There are two important obstacles in getting accurate predictions. In order to show you what we mean by each, let’s dive into two different situations.

Sometimes people just don’t know the truth

Katie wants the perfect prom dress, but more importantly, she wants to make sure none of her friends wear the same one. Katie gets a little carried away. On the first day of school in September, she surveys all of her friends to find out what color dress they’re buying for prom in May. Flash-forward to prom night, Katie shows up wearing a magenta dress only to see that Stacey is wearing the same exact one. Boiling with rage, she reminds Stacey that on the September survey she had said she’d be wearing yellow. Stacey shrugs and says, “Well, yellow would clash with my new blonde highlights. I didn’t have highlights in September.”

What happened? People aren’t very good at making long-term predictions. Circumstances can change in ways that we can’t anticipate and that impacts the way that we behave.

How could you avoid this problem?

1. Repeat it: It might be that Stacey–or any of Katie’s other friends–changes her opinions about dress color a lot. Sending out a survey more than once will capture these shifts and allow Katie to intervene before prom night and remind her friends how she has that magenta dress on lockdown!
2. Keep it current: Survey people as close to the event as possible. In Katie’s case, if she had surveyed her friends two weeks before prom, she might have discovered Stacey’s change of heart before prom night.

Sometimes people just don’t want to tell you the truth

In 1982, Tom Bradley ran for governor of California against George Deukmejian. Polls leading up to the election showed an easy win for Bradley. The San Francisco Chronicle was so sure about this that it declared: “Bradley Win Projected.” This became a little embarrassing for them when Bradley lost the election to Deukmejian. Why? Racial dynamics was said to have played a role. Tom Bradley is African-American and it seemed as if the white voters who were polled over the phone were uncomfortable admitting out loud that they didn’t want to vote for an African-American candidate.

What happened? People don’t like admitting behaviors–in surveys or otherwise–that might make them look bad. When asking for predictions of what people will do, watch out for social desirability bias just as we discussed earlier.

How could you avoid this problem?

1. Keep it confidential: Write a sentence or two reminding your respondents that no one is reading their answers and that the responses will be analyzed in aggregate only—that is, you’re looking at averages and trends, not individual responses. People will be more truthful if they think no one will be able to trace their answer back to them.
2. Let it out: Allow respondents to explain why if they want to. This will allow them to justify the circumstances that led them to pick a certain answer. It doesn’t matter if the explanation they provide is truthful or not, it’s there as a safety blanket for them.

There you have it–all the tips you need to start predicting behaviors without having to drag around a pesky crystal ball!

Don’t be shy! What kinds of predictions will you ask for in your next survey?

Oh, and what color shirt are you planning on wearing two years from now–we want to make sure it doesn’t clash with the blog post we’ll be posting that day.

Image courtesy of BigStock photo

Predicting Behaviors Without a Crystal Ball–Here’s How!

We had a very special guest come by to speak with us here at SurveyMonkey recently! Don Graham, Chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company–an American mass media organization that owns the historic newspaper, The Washington Post, as well as Slate Magazine, testing and online education company, Kaplan and more.

Before taking on the chief executive officer position however, Don got his start in the world of news while an undergraduate at Harvard University where he served as president of The Harvard Crimson–the country’s oldest college newspaper. Not long after graduation, Don was drafted and served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 as an information specialist in the 1st Calvary Division. He then became a patrolman for the Washington Metropolitan Police Department before joining The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971. Within five years, Don became an executive vice president and was named general manager of the newspaper.

In addition to the significant contributions he’s made to news media while at The Washington Post, Don’s passion and unwavering belief in the importance of and access to quality education is apparent in his company’s support of Kaplan. There are nearly 70 campuses in 20+ states here in America and they’re also expanding their outreach in education across the globe with their international units Kaplan Europe and Kaplan Asia Pacific.

This dedication to education is also shared by all of us here at SurveyMonkey. Our CEO, Dave Goldberg, is proud to serve on The Post’s Board of Directors and he sat down with Don to talk about the exciting educational opportunities that both The Washington Post Company and Kaplan are helping bring to the students of today and tomorrow:

To learn more about Kaplan’s educational programs and initiatives, please visit their page here.

Questions? Comments for us? You know where to go!

SurveyMonkey Speaker Series Presents: Don Graham, Chairman & CEO of The Washington Post Company

Whether you’re a first-timer or a veteran in survey design, SurveyMonkey Audience gives you the ability to choose a specific target demographic for whatever your survey goals may be.

Our goal is to help boost your survey project to the next level and get you the insights you need. So now you’re ready to start your first SurveyMonkey Audience project…what should you be aware of? How much does it cost to get started? And how did we come to those numbers anyway? Let’s take a behind-the-scenes look, shall we?

We wanted to help explain our pricing philosophy so you can be better informed with how it impacts the cost of your survey projects.

When thinking about our pricing model, we always strive to maintain two key virtues:

• Transparency: We want customers to be able to know how we price. We use a formula to determine pricing for every Audience project, and we are open to provide the details of each element in our pricing structure.
• Fairness: We try to match the costs we incur and value we create to the way we price our offering. And we strive to make sure that no customer pays more than another for the same product.

Since we reward every respondent who completes an Audience survey, we have to consider our costs in our pricing model. But we also want to make sure that those costs align with the value our customers get from our product.

Not surprisingly, the challenge involved in delivering our product and the value that our customers gain from SurveyMonkey Audience are tightly correlated. The harder it is for us to deliver our product, the more valuable it is for our customers.

We mentioned ‘challenge’. What kinds of challenges do we face with an Audience project that makes it more or less costly for us to deliver? How should customers think about the value we provide and how does that affect project pricing?

The main components in our pricing model come in four parts:

1) Survey Length: We charge based on the number of questions in a survey, which is directly correlated to the amount of time required for a respondent to complete a survey. The longer the survey, the more people will drop out. The more “supply” that is “wasted”, the more chances there are for errors in survey design and increased risk of quality control issues like satisficing (and don’t worry, that’s not a typo). Since length is the most important variable in our pricing, it makes short surveys very inexpensive since they incur minimal operational expense.

2) Targeting: The harder your targeted Audience is to find (i.e., moms who are vegetarians who have smartphones but don’t own tablets, etc.) the more work we have to do to find them. Certain groups are also more difficult to reach and may have higher or lower survey invitation “open and complete” rates. So we charge more for attributes that we believe customers find more valuable.

3) Incidence: While we can often use our targeting to narrow down respondent groups and increase the “effective incidence”, screening out respondents is still often required. In our business model, we still provide rewards to respondents whether they’re screened out or complete a full survey. We do this because it has shown positive effects to member engagement and data quality. We also work with other data providers who use variable reward amounts based on the number of questions answered.

So while we don’t charge the same amount that we charge for a fully completed response when respondents are screened out of a survey, we still charge a fee to support our costs. This cost is factored into our “per complete” price. Incidence pricing is only available when using a sales representative, and not in the self-service version of SurveyMonkey Audience.

4) Complexity: When customers require complex rules, restrictions or quotas that our automated tools may not support without manual intervention, it requires more work from our team, and creates more possibilities for errors. While we seek to avoid manual processes, some are required for certain projects to ensure we can help our customers make better decisions using our products. When highly custom requirements are required for a project, we charge additional fees based on the extent of the complexity.

Our pricing model and our self-service tool (which can be found within your existing SurveyMonkey account) have done a few key things:

• Decreased prices significantly for customers who typically run shorter surveys
• Increased prices for customers who have longer surveys
• Helped educate customers on how the length of time required to complete a survey can have real data integrity issues (and cost more to complete)

There you have it, survey fans–our comprehensive approach to pricing for SurveyMonkey Audience!

Stay tuned for more–we’ll take you through some of the interesting facts about survey length, which have helped us formulate our pricing models.

Questions? Let us know in the Comments section below or you can contact us at audience@surveymonkey.com.

Image courtesy of BigStock photo.

Behind The Scenes: How We Determine SurveyMonkey Audience Pricing

After the week the Obama administration has faced, depression seems like an unfortunate inevitability for the Democratic Party. Scandals aside, are Democrats actually more likely to be depressed because of their political affiliation?

Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over just about every social, economic, and political issue–perhaps that extends to other mental and behavioral disorders as well.

In order to better understand what role politics play in mental health, we partnered with our friends at BuzzFeed to get some answers. Using SurveyMonkey Audience, we surveyed over 1100 Americans to find out.

So, who’s more likely to have anxiety? Which party has a higher rate of Dyslexia? Check out the infographic below for the breakdown by political party. To see the rest of the results, read on at BuzzFeed.

Are Democrats More Depressed Than Republicans? BuzzFeed and SurveyMonkey Find Out…

So you want to know what people like the best, right? What sweet treat is considered the crème de la crème of your fave restaurant’s dessert list? Who do your students think should get the gold star for teacher of the year? Maybe you want to create a top ten list of this year’s best (or worst) movies? Well, you’re in the right place, dear customers. You can do all that and more in your surveys thanks to our handy-dandy Ranking Question!

The Ranking question option is an interactive and fun survey design choice. Your respondents can choose to click into the number field and type in their rankings, use their mouse to drag-and-drop their choices or they can choose from a drop down menu. As a heads-up for your survey respondents, you may want to include some additional text letting them know their answer choices will move automatically once they start ranking away.

Let’s take a peek.

Now what about calculating those averages based off of your respondents’ answers? We’ve got you covered. The ranking choices will always be weighted with equivalent value. For example, in our question above, if we rank “Cake” as our number one choice, this will be calculated with a weight of 1.

If you’d like to include the N/A option, go ahead and check off the option for this when creating your question. That way, it will be counted as “0”, but won’t be calculated into the averages which would throw them off.

So your Ranking question is all set up–let the games begin. Who knows? Maybe that movie everyone said was a flop turns out to be a hit thanks to your survey? Perhaps you’ll get your just desserts when you find out that floury mess in the kitchen was all worth it as your guests happily chow down on your specialty cakes.

Regardless of the outcome, you’ll know that you came out #1 at survey design!

What do you think? Feel like a rankings expert yet or have more questions? Let us know in the Comments section below!

Get Your Ranking On: We Show You How!

The Internet, the media–both print and rich–news channels, podcasts, YouTube, magazines, books…there’s no lack of where to go to find information. Now say you’re a college student and you’ve just received your first research paper assignment. With all that’s out there by way of information sources, how in the world do you know where to start your research? What’s out there besides Wikipedia? Can a person–an actual person–help guide you?

Say hello to your friendly academic librarian. These are folks with graduate degrees in Library and Information Science (LIS) who have studied to become experts in helping students, non-students, professionals and non-professionals alike make their way through the sometimes confusing maze of information resources. According to the American Library Association, there are currently over 60 accredited programs in the study of LIS across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Lindy Scripps-Hoekstra is an academic librarian at Grand Valley State University, a scholarly community of over 25,000 students and faculty in Michigan. Lindy and her librarian colleagues, Ashley Rosener and Max Eckard, have been conducting research using SurveyMonkey in order to learn more about the kinds of skills that recent LIS grads have acquired and how prepared they are to become the next generation of academic librarians.

Tell us what you worked on.

For new graduates of LIS Master’s programs, obtaining positions in college and university libraries can be challenging. As recent graduates ourselves, we were interested in determining what factors may give certain graduates a better chance at obtaining positions as academic librarians. While soft-skills like personality and public speaking are quite valuable during a job search, we were more interested in the quantifiable experiences of graduates, such as what courses they took, work or volunteer experiences and type of program selected.

Previous studies on this topic have focused on the perspectives of search committees and job posting descriptions. We wanted to switch the focus to the experiences of LIS graduates who successfully landed jobs in order to determine what factors might make the most impact in a job search. An online survey was the perfect tool for gathering this information!

How did you put your plan in action?

We emailed our survey to recent graduates of LIS programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and North Carolina Central University. We also posted a link to the survey in related listservs and new librarian-focused forums. While we didn’t offer any tangible incentive, we did encourage participation by focusing on how responses would help the next generation of library science students make decisions to enhance their employability.

What did you find out?

The majority of LIS graduates who successfully obtained jobs in academic libraries after graduation…

• attended their graduate program full-time
• began their job search early—at least four months before graduation
• found their jobs within three months of graduation
• generally applied to up to ten positions
• had experience working in academic library settings, either a job, internship or volunteer work
• participated in professional development by attending library-related conferences and workshops
• took courses focused on academic librarianship
• did not always need to relocate to find a position

We also learned that there’s a wealth of job searching advice for today’s LIS graduate. However, much of this advice is anecdotal and based on one person’s unique experience. Our survey results corroborate this advice on the basis of data from hundreds of respondents.

What’s next?

We’ll be presenting the results of our survey to other librarians and library school students at two upcoming professional conferences. We also hope to begin work on an article detailing our research and findings for publication in a scholarly journal within the field of library and information science.

Click here to learn more about Grand Valley State University and their libraries.

Getting started on your first scholarly research project? Don’t forget to check out our academic survey templates available here!

Customer Spotlight on Grand Valley State University Libraries: Using Surveys for Career Research

Let’s imagine for a moment that your web-based business’s ability to collect online payments from customers is just like your body’s ability to digest food. The easier it is to accept (and digest) those payments, the bigger and stronger your business will become. So, the easier it is for your customers to pay you, the more satisfied they’ll probably be. The chances of them coming back for a second, third or fourth helping are much higher if they have a hassle-free payment experience than one that’s complicated or too slow.

Using SurveyMonkey Audience, an online tool for gaining insights from a target demographic, we asked over 300 Americans how they prefer to make payments when making online purchases. We wanted to better understand how their payment preferences might differ for personal purchases vs. making purchases for work and also find out how people feel about auto-recurring subscription services like Netflix and The New York Times.

Here’s what we learned.

Perhaps not surprisingly, good old-fashioned plastic is still the most preferred payment method online for Americans. Online payment service, PayPal, and debit cards are neck and neck with one another for second place.

Since recurring-billing subscription business models like the ones used by Netflix, The New York Times, DropBox (and ours!) continue to thrive, we wanted to know how folks prefer to pay for their services.

For online subscriptions, once again the credit card turned out to be the #1 preferred payment option by an overwhelming majorify for auto-recurring subscriptions. Hardly anyone opted for PayPal. This is an interesting insight for business owners with this type of subscription model–adding PayPal as a provider might not need to be at the top of your payment priority list.

However, no need to worry, PayPal fans. For people who make purchases on behalf of their business or employer, PayPal was the preferred payment method at 15%.

For those who work in Business-to-business (B2B) transactions, it might be worth experimenting in using PayPal as a payment provider.

This is just a taste of what we learned about consumers and their online payment preferences. To learn about how mobile devices affect consumer payment choices and more, check out our full set of survey results here.

Are you interested in hearing more from your customers and getting your own business as healthy and strong as it can be? Get started with SurveyMonkey Audience today!

Credit Cards or PayPal: How Do Consumers Prefer to Pay Online?

Have you bought your Mother’s Day gift yet? Well, if you’re a mom yourself, chances are good you’ve already done so. While some of us may still be trying to decide between flowers and candy, marketers have honed in on an important fact: Moms are in charge! It’s a common assumption that they make the majority of purchasing decisions in American households, making mothers an impressive economic force.

To better understand how they spend their dollars, PiktoChart and SurveyMonkey Audience, teamed up to gather feedback from over 300 moms. Check out the infographic below for our survey results on spending habits, Internet use, and mobile device preference of moms.

 Happy Mother’s Day to all you wonderful moms out there!

Want to learn more about how to find the best target audience for your next survey? Get started with SurveyMonkey Audience today.

Moms Have the Spending Power! How and Where Are They Buying?

Survey methodology and design. Analytics. Making customers happy. Keep ‘em coming, these are phrases we here at SurveyMonkey just love to hear, see, speak–you name it. Nashville-based Listen, Learn, Live LLC–a customer experience consulting company–shares our passion for listening to customers and learning how to keep them engaged and happy.

Take a guess as to what they use to help accomplish their mission? That’s right. Online surveys help bring in those important insights needed in order for Listen, Learn, Live to create an optimal experience for their customer base.

Donna Drehmann, President and owner of Listen, Learn, Live LLC, shares how she uses SurveyMonkey to help her customers learn how to work smarter and start to “listen, learn and live”!

Donna Drehmann, President & Owner

We’re in the business of helping other businesses and organizations of any size increase their customer loyalty and growth potential. Listening to your customers, Learning from what they tell you, and Living the customer experience that they expect will increase your loyalty and your revenue. Happy customers spend more for the same service, make repeat purchases and tell others about your company. We believe in helping you work smarter, not harder!

Our tagline–”Are You Listening?”–challenges the business owner to respond and decide if they want to take action. The premise is simple: If you’re not listening to your customers and learning from what they tell you, then you should be. We get our customer feedback program started by performing a Needs Assessment to create a unique customer feedback survey and utilizing our proven Guiding Principles–surveys should be actionable, each response should have an owner, and don’t ask a question that your company should already know. Our surveys are designed specifically for your business, with your customers in mind.

For the most part, businesses “don’t know what they don’t know” about how their customer experience stacks up, and so a gap exists–a gap that’s costing money. We close that gap by getting real feedback from real customers. Some may be fearful of asking for feedback because they suspect it will be negative. However, the majority of it is often positive so businesses lose out on the opportunity to market themselves to others if they don’t take the opportunity to collect those insights from customers.

We chose to use SurveyMonkey to serve our customers because it’s a flexible and dynamic platform that adapts easily to the changing needs of our clients. Their analysis features allows us to organize and segment our data in a clear format making it easy for our clients to understand. Being able to include our client’s logo within the survey design and customize it to match their color scheme and language also makes it easy for us to seal the deal.

The data we’ve obtained for our clients with SurveyMonkey has led to a reduction in duplication of work, an increase in efficiencies, the redesign of a marketing campaign (now aimed at what they do well) and an increase in customer referrals. All data that’s valuable to our clients–bringing them more revenue, making them efficient, and reminding them what they’re good at.

Here’s an example:

Is your company looking to get actionable insights? Want to learn how to improve your customers’ experience? Be sure to visit Listen, Learn, Live LLC and leave your questions for Donna in the Comments section!

Don’t forget to check out our many customer satisfaction and market research survey templates available for you here.

Customer Spotlight on Listen, Learn, Live: “Increasing Customer Loyalty One Survey at a Time”