Grapevine 3.0 is a moderately priced, relatively full-featured online self-service survey solution published by Toronto-based Business.ca. It offers most of the basic features, a few of the advanced features, and a collection of well designed, pre-written surveys and design templates that are sure to appeal to small companies and organizations who aren’t looking to spend a lot of time reinventing the marketing research wheel. The survey design/management interface is fairly easy to master, although the non-Web 2.0 driven survey development environment can sometimes be a little slow and frustrating. The system includes a lovely reporting engine, the ability to add multiple users to one account, the ability to upload lists of respondents (and send out invitations) and a fairly strong help system. While I am not so sure that I would recommend this package for advanced users or firms that intend to do a lot of research, it may be a very appropriate choice for a firm that finds the pre-written, pre-designed surveys worth the cost.
Survey Design/Development
Grapevine users can develop their own surveys from scratch or can start from one of a few dozen pre-written survey "templates" from a variety of categories including "customer," "human resources," "marketing/sales," "products," "retail," "B2B," "board [of director] surveys," "community social," "education," "health care," "web polls," and "web site." Thumbnails of each of these starter templates make it easy to get a sense of both how the questions are organized and the design motif. These templates (of which there appear to be at least a hundred) are in and of itself a reason to explore the Grapevine survey system — especially if you don’t have a lot of experience writing survey questions. Even if you’ve written plenty of your own surveys, you may find some of the questions provided in the templates useful.
Whether you develop your survey on your own from scratch or use one of the template, you will very quickly find yourself in the Grapevine question editor. What I liked about the editor is that it makes it fairly easy to format the text of your questions any way you choose (font, size, style — plus the ability to make questions as long as you need them to be). I also like the fact that it provides a lot of help text and variety of ways you can customize each question (for example, if you want you can display an open-ended "comment" box under whichever questions you choose). Sample questions can be viewed on the Grapevine web site.
Grapevine offers the usual variety of question types, including closed-ended single selection, closed-ended multiple selection, rating scales, open-ended text responses, and even multiple answer grids (which allow you to have several different drop-down or checkbox questions on each line of the matrix). It also offers constant sum questions (where people fill in numbers that have to add up to a number you set) and special date fields (it shows drop down boxes for month, day and year). Grapevine does not offer ranking questions or other advanced question types.
I don’t like the fact that the software has to refresh/reload the page every time I change the question type or even any of the options for each question type. For example, if I try to do something as simple as changing the number of answer options in a question from 3 to 5, I first make the change in the drop down box (from "3" to "9") and then I have to wait a few seconds before the page is redrawn with the nine answer boxes I requested. While a few seconds isn’t a lot, when you consider that I have to change several options for each question (each with its own wait time) and that I have to make lots of questions, you can imagine that the annoyances would start to add up. It breaks your flow — throws off your rhythm…and it seems unnecessary in an day and age where Javascript and AJAX make such waits unnecessary.
The same is true when it comes to question management — yes, the software makes it pretty easy to change the order of questions and to move questions from one page to another — but at the same time, each change requires a wait that could be extremely annoying if you had to rearrange a lot of questions.
Grapevine does allow you to upload images and other documents that can be included with each question (images, such as JPG files or GIF files are displayed instead of the question — other files, such as Word, Excel, or PDF files appear as links that can be opened below the question text) however it only allows you to include one image per question, and you have to upload each image with each of the questions that you add.
Grapevine offers some flexibility in terms of the overall look (design) of your survey by providing you with 38 "graphic skins" (style templates) which are split among several categories ("aggressive", "artistic", "business", "collaboration", "education" and "simplistic"). Almost all of these templates are designed so that you can include your own logo at the top and some of them are quite creative and may just do the trick for those of you who want your surveys to look good but don’t want to spend a lot of time customizing the look and feel. Graphic skins, incidentally, are not customizable from the interface — if you want something different what what is available you can hire Grapevine to create a customized skin for you.
Grapevine offers both page/question skipping and piping. Both of these functions only work when you use multiple pages (which is fairly normal).
Data Collection & User Experience
The sample surveys on the Grapevine website are for the most part very attractive and illustrate what the user experience can be like. In my experimentation I was unable to create surveys that look as attractive as the sample surveys, although I have to admit I didn’t spend a great deal of time trying. One thing I think that is particularly interesting about the way in which Grapevine asks questions is that it doesn’t use the traditional radio buttons and check boxes but instead uses a combination of images mixed with custom JavaScript to provide a more unique appearance and apparently allows Grapevine to assert more control in the design of the controls. Whether or not it improves the survey experience is something you will have to decide for yourself.
For multi-page surveys, Grapevine provides progress displays, "previous" and "next" buttons as appropriate. Surveys can include both introductory messages and thank you messages.
Users can save their responses as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file and then print them. A feature apparently unique to Grapevine is the ability of respondents to forward their response to friends and coworkers via a form on the "Thank you" page.
Another feature apparently unique to the Grapevine Survey System is the ability to have the system send out e-mail alerts to specific individuals when respondents answer questions you specify in certain ways. For example, if I asked the question, "do you plan to break a law today?" in my survey, I can set it to automatically e-mail the police if someone answers "Yes."
Grapevine has the capability to save incomplete surveys so that users can come back and finish later provided that you use the respondent account management system.
Grapevine does not feature the ability to maintain a library of questions and answers that you can reuse from survey to survey. Nor does it make it easy to copy questions from one survey to another. It will, however, allow you to make copies of existing surveys and reuse them.
Response/Respondent Management
Grapevine allows you to set up all of your potential respondents with "accounts" which can either be entered individually (ugh!) or uploaded using a CSV file (much easier). You can then assign each of your respondents to groups which can then (as a group) be sent customizable invitations to participate in your survey. You can then at any time you want pull up a list of those who have completed the survey and those who have not.
In some ways, the Grapevine respondent account system functions as a rudimentary panel management system since it allows you to put people into groups, each of which can receive different surveys. If you’re actually looking for a survey system that includes panel management feature then this is not going to be a good alternative for you since each individual must be manually assigned to each group and you don’t have the option of sorting and selecting by demographic or behavioral characteristics.
Grapevine allows you to set a launch date and a finish date for each of your survey, as well as the maximum number of responses you want to collect. You can also set a password that respondents have to know before they can have access to your survey.
Grapevine does not save incomplete survey responses.
Reporting/Exporting Capabilities
There are a lot of positive things to be said about the Grapevine reporting system. I really like that by pushing the "Overall Results" button you are instantly presented with frequency counts, percentages, and even basic bar graphs for all of your questions. This makes it relatively easy to get an overview of all of your results fairly quickly without having to run a lot of separate reports, and the presentation is thoughtful.
I like the fact that from this same overview report it is possible to generate pie charts, bar charts, column charts and line charts with the push of a button. Granted, the quality of lack of customizability of each of these charts means I would probably never copy them into a report for my boss or for a client, but it is a useful feature nonetheless.
I also like that the software provides you with the ability to easily review individual responses, and that it will let you query/filter your results based on responses to specific questions. Plus, you can even run crosstabs on any closed-response question. It even lets you limit your responses to those that are completed during a specific period.
One specifically unique feature of the Grapevine reporting engine is the capability to create something called a "construct grouping." My understanding of this feature is that you can combine the responses from several rating-type questions together to generate an overall score. So, for example, if you were a restaurant and included several rating-type questions about the quality of the food, you could then have the system automatically combine each of the ratings to create a kind of "overall score." It’s an interesting idea that some users may find very useful (and interesting). On the other hand, I do have some concerns because it doesn’t let you control how each of the attributes are rated, nor does it really explain how they are combined. A feature that might be interesting in the future is to add the ability to weight the data.
Grapevine does give you the ability to export your results to Excel or a PDF file and the report that it generates looks pretty good. You can even limit which questions appear in the report. Data can be exported in CSV format with a couple of options to help you import it into SPSS or SAS (although note that it will not export your data directly into either of these formats).
Given the scope of the overall package, I don’t have a lot of complaints about the survey engine. I do wish it would remember when I tell it to hide the results of specific questions so that I don’t have to go back and do the hiding manually every time I want to print a report. I also wish it were possible to tell the software to show the verbatim responses when I go to print the report (as it stands now I have to go in and manually tell it to print the results of each open-ended question separately).
More advanced users will miss the fact that it does not offer any survey stats such as the percentage of users who dropped out of each page, how long it took to answer each page, etc. Also missing is the ability to "publish" your reports so that you can dynamically share the results of the survey with co-workers.
Survey/User Administration
Grapevine allows you to create as many surveys as you want and have them all collect data at the same time (Grapevine charges you based on the number of people who complete your survey and not by the number of surveys you create). Surveys can be edited and re-edited as many times as you like, and you can copy surveys for re-use as "new" surveys. One neat touch is that you can even save your surveys in "folders" to keep them organized.
One especially well-implemented feature of Grapevine is the ability to add multiple "users" (survey administrators) to your account. Each person you give an account to can be allowed to view reports, edit surveys, or even create surveys — depending on their access level. Users can even be given permission to edit or view surveys on a survey by survey basis (which is probably better than giving users unlimited access to every survey on your account).
Help/Technical Support/Services
In addition to the variety of templates and examples provided directly within the context of the survey development system, Grapevine also offers 24 hours e-mail and telephone support. In addition, Grapevine offers survey management services (where they will take your questions and create the surveys for you), question writing services, and training services. Grapevine will also create custom survey designs for you and can even provide you with respondents (using reputable survey panels) if you need them. Grapevine will also provide survey translation services.
Pricing
Pricing for the use of the Grapevine service is based on the number of your surveys that are completed and ranges from $400 for one hundred responses ($4 each) to $80,000 for half a million responses. Fees are charged to your credit card, which they will keep on file. A Grapevine Survey System subscription is twelve months.
Incidentally…at the time of this writing (Sept, ’06) Grapevine is offering a free trial which allows you to play with the design/reporting interface and collect up to 25 responses.
To learn more about Grapevine visit their web site at http://www.grapevinesurveys.com.