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Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Aug 18, 2009
 Last month’s Research magazine had as its cover story “ World of temptation”, focusing on the negative ramifications of DIY (Do It Yourself) survey research: The problem for the future of research as a discipline isn’t so much that SurveyMonkey has made simple research more accessible, but that the people doing the research might not be very good at it. This could be, as the prostitute said looking at two lovers kissing, a great profession ruined by amateurs. “It’s great on one hand because it shows how much passion there is to get information about customers, but if any monkey can do a survey, perhaps any monkey will. In some cases there will be no control over design, no control over the sample,” says [Brad Bortner, a Forrester Research analyst specializing in the market research industry].
This article has inspired follow-on editorials and blog posts (e.g., “ Setting research free”) and quite a bit of discussion. One comment in particular stood out to me: “DIY is great as a means for firms to engage with their customers and generate customer feedback,” commented Gill Wales, an independent market researcher. “But the purveyors of DIY solutions need to make clear the limitations of the DIY solution in unskilled hands.” As a fine purveyor of survey software since 1993, I’ll take Gill up on her challenge. If survey tool providers were to write a Surgeon General’s style warning about the dangers of Do-It-Yourself research, what should it say? My take on it: 
If you were the Survey General, what would you put on the label? How would you keep Do-It-Yourself surveys from becoming Do-Yourself-In surveys? See also:
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, May 12, 2009
| Support Model |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Email support |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Online knowledgebase support |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Phone support |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| SAS-70 Secure datacenter hosting |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Questionnaire Design |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Survey responses |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
| Max # of Users |
1 Only |
1 Only |
Unlimited |
| Brand your own thank you page |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Save, copy and edit surveys |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Add own logo to survey |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Spell check |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Basic skip logic |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Advanced branching based on Boolean Logic |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Screenout questions |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Pre-loaded design themes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Build a mixed-type matrix/table question (ex. choose one + choose many + fillin or essay) |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Edit question HTML directly |
Basic |
Advanced |
Advanced |
| Export survey to Word |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Import survey from Word |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Import/export survey to XML |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Find and replace |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Include progress bar in survey |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Rank order question type |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Hidden Questions to augment response data set |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Email Triggers based on responses |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Scoring |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Design from provided library of template surveys |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Save questions to/Use questions from template library |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Use themes from template library |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Word Processor Questionnaire Design Environment |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Conditional Choices - make a set of responses dependent on a previous question |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Multiple End Page options |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Custom URL at end of survey |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Auto-next (proceed to next page automatically when possible) |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Support for JavaScript in survey |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| In-tool side-by-side survey translation capability |
No |
No |
Yes |
| XLIFF support for XML-based extract, translation and re-import |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Randomize answer list |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Data Piping |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Customize text of Save, Next, Submit, Back, Reset and Jump survey buttons |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Set Advanced Table Properties: column width, borders, text wrapping, color bands on odd/even rows, anchors, repeat table headings, separate N/A and DK from choice list and more |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Page Rotation and Randomization |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Hierarchical Questions |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Answer required checks/Mandatory Question |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Survey Mgmt, Publishing & Invitations |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Folder categorization of surveys |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Open participation survey |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Personalize email invitations |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| HTML email editing |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Send reminders |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Automation of reminder scheduling |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Multilingual email variations |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Store email lists |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Thank you email |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Import/Export email lists |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Pre-schedule survey launch and close |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Project Collaboration - assign a survey to multiple people |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Workflow for survey approval |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Workgroup administrator role based permission |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Allow respondents to re-enter survey |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Survey test mode |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Quota management |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Random test data generator |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Allow respondents to change their original answers |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Panel Management & Segmentation |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Panel is integrated into invitation sending |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Capture profile information on each panelist |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Segment panelists for individual survey invitations |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Track panelist survey participation |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Surveys that add panelists to the panel |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Change panelist status |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Panel basic health report |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Random selection of panelists |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Panelist filtering |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Saving panelist filter rules |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Sharing saved panelist filters |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Response Collection & Data Management |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Password protect each survey respondent (unique password per respondent) |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ensure only one response per email address |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Distinguishes between partials and full completes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Export responses to Excel |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ability to download responses to SPSS |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Ability to download responses to CSV or TSV |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Response validation - make sure all responses adhere to branching rules |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Respondent data editor (edit respondent data) |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Filter response dataset with boolean logic |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Results can be exported - then cleaned -and re-imported to the system |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Reporting & Analysis |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Download editable report in PPT or Word or PDF |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Link to live, public reports on web |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Download editable report in Excel |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Filtering report source for one question |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Filtering report source for entire report |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Create custom report elements |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Saving custom reports |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Display summary statistics - avg, std dev, count, sum, min/max, mode, mean |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Tables and charts are supported -options include show rows with zero counts, show coded-value counts, show not answered counts, etc |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Trend report:Shows results (summary statistics) using week, month, quarter or year as banner. The report element uses the survey submission time stamp to determine breakpoints. |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Live Instant Results Shown to Respondents |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Pie chart (2D or 3D) |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Column or Line chart |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Stacked column |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Stacked bar |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Banner (crossbreak) definitions for comprehensive cross-tabulations |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Report on top "n" and bottom "n" score |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Correlation analysis with variance, kurtosis, simple regression |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| 2-way Cross-tabbing |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| 3-way Cross-tabbing |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Show/hide empty columns/rows control |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Reports access control by workgroup administrator |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Architecture, Security and API |
SurveyMonkey |
Vovici, Individual Edition |
Vovici, Enterprise Edition |
| Full library of web services to put data into system |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Full library of web services to take data out of system |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Role-based Security |
No |
No |
Yes |
| User control to response tables, groups, or individual surveys |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Regular password change control |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Online Community add-on |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Business Intelligence add-on |
No |
No |
Yes |
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Apr 30, 2009
SurveyMonkey lacks many of the capabilities of Vovici's Individual Edition to control, protect and support your survey research. These Individual Edition capabilities include:
Control
- Promote your brand by managing custom domain names or subdomains (e.g., www.yourcompanyhere.com or surveys.yourcompanyhere.com)
- Enforce brand recognition and personalize the look and feel of your surveys through more flexible configurations
- Save time by importing surveys directly from Microsoft Word
- Generate professional reports through one-button export to Microsoft Word or PowerPoint
- Build smarter surveys by using existing responses to tailor follow-up questions
- Leverage pre-existing information (e.g. history, transaction) to enhance the value of response data through hidden fields
- Help respondents understand questions through customizable tool tips
Protect
Support
- Rely on Vovici's live customer support team to get the help you need
- Leverage Vovici's web-based training to get a fast start, or refresher, on your next survey project
To learn more about Vovici Individual Edition, check out the three-minute demo or the product and features page. Join the customers who moved up from SurveyMonkey to Vovici in migrating to a survey business platform that you won't outgrow.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Apr 08, 2009
Successful online surveys often grow from projects to processes:
- That one-off survey project to determine satisfaction with the help desk about a particular upgrade is now a regular process used each time IT rolls out a new application.
- That annual corporate climate study is now a monthly employee-feedback process with the results distributed to over 1000 managers in personalized hierarchical reports.
- That occasional survey to measure satisfaction with the call center is now a weekly census used to measure the satisfaction with each of 500 customer-service representatives.
When you've outgrown that Survey Monkey survey and need to convert your survey projects into feedback processes, check out our robust, scalable and high-performing API (Application Programming Interface) for integration. When surveys are no longer tactical, but strategic, you want a strategic vendor as your partner. When call-center representatives are fired or promoted based on their rolling six-week satisfaction rating, you want iron-clad and litigation-proof data to rely on.
And if you think with Survey Monkey and a wrench that you can build what you need, then by all means give them a call first. Then give us a call at +1.703.481.9326 in the United States and +44 (0)208.547.4040 in Europe to discuss your unique needs.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Mar 27, 2009
In "Survey Monkey Business", I wrote that "Whenever a prospect tells us that the competition for their business is between SurveyMonkey and Vovici, we know that one of us is in the wrong place." Last week I gave some examples of customers who outgrew SurveyMonkey, some of whom moved up to enterprise feedback management, with panel management and CRM integration.
But many customers just need a more powerful survey tool. The three biggest reasons such customers move up to a Vovici v4 Individual or Professional Edition account are:
- Reporting - The prospects spend an inordinate amount of time creating reports in Excel and want the survey tool to do the heavy lifting. The user knows their life can be better, and Vovici v4 dramatically decreases their workload.
- Branding - The prospects want more control over the look and feel of the survey and reports. They want all surveys to be driven from their own domain name (e.g., acme_surveys.foo) or subdomain (e.g., surveys.example.com).
- Advanced Features - Power users of 'Monkey quickly realize the limitations of the tool, and its inability to do advanced branching, data piping and multi-language surveys.
You can dress a monkey in silk, but...
If you're interested in learning more, schedule a live demo or give us a call at +1.703.481.9326.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Mar 17, 2009
Many Vovici customers came to us after outgrowing SurveyMonkey, which is an excellent "first barrel of monkeys" for playing around with web surveys. Some of our customers who moved upmarket:
- A professional association wanted a tool as easy to use as SurveyMonkey but with more flexible reporting and analysis.
- A market-research firm was using SurveyMonkey but ran into difficulties writing screener questions (which often require advanced branching) and needed rich analytics and application integration.
- A professional services firm needed to field a survey simultaneously in six languages and wanted all the results to collect in one data table rather than six separate tables.
- A government agency was using SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang, among other survey tools, and wanted to standardize on one system across the agency.
- A telecommunications equipment manufacturer wanted to move from pockets of survey software to enterprise feedback management across the company.
- A university liked the free-form word processor of Vovici v4 and the time-savings of its report generation.
As a research analyst at the university said, "Everybody wants to do a survey for everything under the sun. The demand for surveys is already high because there is a culture of data-driven strategic planning. The power coming out of Vovici's app has stoked an increased demand. People get addicted to data through SurveyMonkey but realize how hard it is to create a great and successful survey. They ultimately realize how restricted they are, so they come to us to use Vovici."
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Mar 06, 2009
Whenever a prospect tells us that the competition for their business is between SurveyMonkey and Vovici, we know that one of us is in the wrong place.
SurveyMonkey is great for a consumer or blogger doing a quick survey. Vovici v4 is designed for business professionals interested in the systematic gathering of feedback, not just one-off surveys. The key features our prospects are looking for:
- Integration and automation. Our customers are often conducting ongoing transactional surveys to measure satisfaction after a customer-service contact, a product order, a warranty repair or some other standard event. Using SurveyMonkey, this requires regular manual intervention. Vovici v4's rich API enables organizations to integrate feedback management with CRM systems, HRIS applications, customer-support systems, help-desk applications, web portals and more.
- Panel management. As organizations do more and more surveys, they outgrow the simple list management of SurveyMonkey and want to maintain panels of customers, employees and resellers, with each panel storing a rich set of profile data: demographic, firmographic and attitudinal information that can be used to target survey invitations. They also want to track when individuals were last invited to a survey and how many surveys they've completed. The sophisticated clients want to use panel management to treat their respondents like valued partners.
- Advanced reporting. Many organizations have unique, legacy report formats that have evolved over time to meet their needs. The standard SurveyMonkey reports won't do. Generating these custom reports each month can be quite time consuming and labor intensive. Vovici v4 APIs can be used to streamline this process. Other organizations wish to integrate reports with business-process data or disseminate reports throughout the enterprise, with individuals receiving their own unique views at the data. Vovici Feedback Intelligence is the solution for these firms.
If your organization needs any of the above, by all means call SurveyMonkey. Then call us: +1.703.481.9326 in the United States and +44 (0)208.547.4040 in Europe. When it comes to surveys, we mean business.
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