Qualtrics: (internet survey software) has a fantastic variety of question types with a really easy to use survey development system. Also features advanced survey branching capabilities including looping, random blocks of questions and more.

SurveyGizmo: (internet survey software) Also extremely easy to use survey package with a lot of features. Probably the most “Web 2.0″ survey system out their. Friendly, irreverant, with plenty of features for both the advanced user who wants to control every element of the survey experience and the analyst who just wants to get the project done. Has good e-mail invite capabilities, basic analysis tools. Plus, the free account has more features than any other “free” accounts I’ve seen.

SurveyZ: (internet survey software) This is the “light” version of Qualtrics, great for academic surveys. The survey development system isn’t anywhere near as pretty as the Qualtrics engine, but it offers a lot of advanced capabilities and question types. If you’re not doing a ton of surveys and you don’t want to spend a crazy amount of money, take a look at this package.

Digivey Survey Suite: (kiosk survey software) If you’re looking to do a survey in your store on a computer or kiosk, this software is absolutely for you. It is super easy to program, allows you to create really great looking surveys, and is fairly indestructable in the field (that is, respondents have a hard time breaking it). Great company too willing to work with you to make sure you have what you need. I’ve been a customer for quite a while now.

Techneos Entryware Software: (handheld survey software) If you’re trying to do surveys on handhelds, then I absolutely have to recommend Techneos Survey Software. I’ll admit I don’t love their pricing model, but I’m stuck because no handheld based survey platform offers as many features and is as easy to use — and as customizable — as the Techneos Entryware platform. I’ve been a customer of this group for over 5 years.

Detailed reviews of all these packages can be found on this site, including everything I liked and didn’t like about each of them. Many more reviews are coming shortly. Thanks for reading!

If you’re like most people, you probably only have a limited number of potential respondents for your survey. You may have a list of your club members, or a list of fellow students, or even a list of customers you’ve painstakenly collected over a period of months if not years. You’re all set to send them a survey, and figure you’re all set to go — after all, your survey software provider has made it a snap to upload your e-mail addresses and send out personalized invitations on your behalf. Right?

Stop right there! How do you know that e-mails sent by your survey software company aren’t going to end up in the bulk mail folder or spam folder of your recipients?

If there is one thing I’ve become painfully aware of as I’ve looked at the various survey software packages out there, it is that very few survey systems put much effort into how they manage the e-mail they are sending. And since these systems send out such a high volume of e-mail, many of them are blacklisted by internet service providers or blocked using standard spam filters.

Here are some things to ask about if you plan to use your survey software provider to send e-mail on your behalf or manage your e-mail list.

See if your survey software provider uses certified e-mail

There are several companies that offer something called e-mail certification. These companies work closely with ISPs and companies to guarantee that anyone using their service will automatically be “trusted” by the e-mail providers. Getting certified is somewhat of a complicated process, but in my experience using SenderScore Certified, it is worth it since just about every e-mail you send out makes it to its destination and doesn’t end up in the spam box.

There are four big companies that offer e-mail certification. These are Habeas, SenderScore Certified, Goodmail, and SuretyMail.

Ordinarily, you as a survey system client wouldn’t need to work directly with any of the companies I just named — optimally, it would be the survey system itself who bonds their e-mail. If your company is bonded separately, then it would behoove you to send your e-mail through your own e-mail system and not through your survey software provider.

Incidentally, the way these certified e-mail providers work is that the client pays an annual fee or a per-email fee for each message that is sent (per recipient). If any of the e-mails are reported as spam (in certain ways) the sender is charged a penalty. Back in the day when I was using Sender Score Certified, every e-mail that was reported as spam cost us $20.

Now, to be fair — survey software providers don’t have a lot of control over what e-mails their clients are uploaded and sending to so it might be very risky for them to participate in such a program. Plus these programs cost several thousand dollars a year to belong to. However, if you’re serious about your e-mail surveys, or if you make your living this way, you may want to investigate sending out your invitations through a separate e-mail service that does offer certified e-mail.

What relationships does the survey vendor have with the ISPs?

Even if a survey software provider doesn’t certify their mail, they can at least develop relationships with the major ISPs such as Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. to help ensure that as many e-mails get through as possible. Getting “white listed” among the major e-mail systems isn’t a terribly complicated thing to do, and it doesn’t cost very much. It will also help to ensure that the vast majority of e-mails make it to their destination.

Is the survey software provider on any blacklists? And is there a way to tell how likely my invitations are to go through?

There are tools on the internet that make it possible for you to get a sense of whether or not your invitations sent through an survey software provider are likely to go through. These tools can also help you know whether or not your survey software provider is on any blacklists. 

An e-mail blacklist is a service that compiles lists of domains and IP addresses that regularly send out spam. These lists are used by companies and ISPs to filter mail before it even makes it to your recipient’s e-mail software. There are dozens of these lists, and once a company is on one it is very difficult to get off.

Here’s what I would do to check on the deliverability of e-mails from a survey software provider. I use a free tool called SenderScore.

1. Go to http://www.senderscore.org

2. Punch in the domain name of the survey system. (Try “zoomerang.com”). You’ll be shown some basic information about how the provider sends out e-mail, such as whether or not they even send out their own e-mail (if they have an MX record), whether or not they have an SPF record (good for deliverability), and whether or not they have a Sender ID record (also good for deliverability).

 You can see on the list above that Zoomerang sends out their e-mail using two different domains — “mailsender.zoomerang.com” and “mailsender2.zoomerang.com.’ You’ll also note that these are both clickable links — so try clicking them. The first link, you’ll notice, indicates absolute no volume of mail being sent, while the second link (“mailsender2.zoomerang.com”) has a very high volume of e-mail. Note the clickable IP address on the left side. Click it.

The page that appears (specifically, the SenderScore information for 63.251.58.111) contains a lot of information that you can use to decide whether or not this survey software provider can get your e-mails through.

Starting from the top: the Sender Score is a summary number that you can use as a measure of this IP address’s “reputation” on the Internet. This number can range from 0 to 100. Let’s just say that if you sent out good e-mail from your own server all of the time you shouldn’t have a problem keeping this number above 90. If you send out to a lot of big e-mail lists where people come and go a lot, you could be at around 60-70. If you send out a lot of e-mail from clients who upload their own lists (like a survey software company, a 40 isn’t surprising.

Some other survey companies and their ratings:

• InsightExpress.com: 98
• ConfirmIt: 80
• SurveyGizmo: 80 [not 25]
• SurveyMonkey: 75
• Qualtrics: 50

Working down the page, you’ll see that next to “blacklists” there is one listing for blackholes.five-ten-sg.com, a fairly aggressive blacklist that lists e-mail senders for many reasons (actually, if you do a search on google you’ll see that this particular blacklists lists so many people that most e-mail servers are not encouraged to takes the list seriously).

Next to “Sender Score Certified” it says no, indicating that Zoomerang does nog subscribe to this particular e-mail certification program.

Under deliverability it says that about 91% of the e-mail sent through this system gets through, and that e-mail sent through this system has a “medium” risk of deliverability issues. Medium isn’t bad and isn’t something you should be worried about. You should definitely be worried if the system you are using says “High.”

Reputiation measures cover a variety of facotrs that ultimatley contribute to the overall score. Higher numbers are always better.

What if I want to improve my deliverability?

Even if you don’t want to switch survey software providers in order to send out your e-mails, you can still get good deliverability by sending your e-mails through a separate service that focuses on sending out e-mails such as CheetahMail, Constant Contact, ExactTarget, Lyris and several others.

Let’s start at the beginning: the survey design interface. Beginning a new survey is as easy as selecting “Create Survey” from the main screen. You can either start with a blank survey, use one of the nine templates that are available (not a very big selection actually…and they’re pretty simple too), or you can copy one of your existing surveys (SurveyGizmo allows you to create an unlimited number of surveys, even if you’re using the free account).

SurveyGizmo’s survey development environment is clean, easy to navigate, and doesn’t require any training or instruction. For example, consider the blank questionnaire I’ve started above — the page even includes a green arrow telling me exactly what I need to click in order to add my first question. The entire interface is like that.

SurveyGizmo has a number of question types — and as far as I can tell new ones are regularly added. It of course includes all of the traditional questions such as single choice radio buttons, multi-choice checkboxes, drop down menus, text boxes and essays,but it also includes some really fancy question types that I’ve never seen anywhere else. For example, SurveyGizmo offers a star ranking table question (see below) that makes it easy and fun for respondents to rate items. It offers image-based single selection question (and makes them easy to implement). It allows for tables/matrixes of radio buttons, drop down menus and checkboxes and also supports a fairly friendly continuous sum and ranking question. SurveyGizmo also supports custom matrixes (table questions that allow for multiple question types in each row) and custom question “groups”, as well as file uploads — but these three features are only available to paying customers.

SurveyGizmo gives you a number of “advanced” option for each question type without making the process intimidating — thereby ensuring that you’ll have an easy time creating your survey but still have the ability to make it do exactly what you want. For example, I created a simple single-selection radio button question with three options. After I finished entering the basic question, I could then easily change the type of answers (checkbox, radio button or dropdown menus); change the orientation of the answers; set a default value; change the number of columns; randomize the options; indicate whether I wanted the question randomized on the page; hide the question based on criteria; number or not number the question; etc. I could also add a custom CSS class name. That’s a lot of options!

For text questions, validation is available to ensure that the responses fits a certain criteria. It is extremely flexible, and is based on regular expressions (or you can choose an option from the drop down list). It is very easy at any point to mark a question as required or not required. If you indicate that a question is a date, it will pull up a calendar when the respondent clicks on it — if you indicate that the field is an e-mail address, the system will do validate that the e-mail address is valid — not just by checking the format, but by contacting the respondent’s e-mail server to make sure it exists. Numeric fields can be automatically formatted as percentages, currency, or whole numbers (it won’t let the respondent enter decimals).

SurveyGizmo’s development environment is entirely AJAX based, which means that when you click a button or make a change you don’t have to wait for a postback — the change takes place immediately. Not a lot of survey packages offer this and it will greatly speed up your survey programming. Surveys can be previewed at any time.

It is very easy to add images or multimedia to your survey — however, only paid accounts are allowed to upload media for storage on the server, so if you’re using the free account you’re going to have to store your images on an account on a different system. Hard to complain though since it’s free…

SurveyGizmo allows branching, skipping and piping. Skipping can either be managed through a simple drop down box (show this question when some other question equals some value) or using advanced rules which have to be manually entered. Piping can be used to add responses to other questions to either the question text or the response area.

In addition to questions, SurveyGizmo allows for “Actions” to be inserted between questions. Some of these actions are about as advanced as any I’ve ever seen in a survey software package and allow you to do random branching, send mobile messages, allow for subscribers to log in, retrieve web content and send e-mails. Most of the actions are available only in the “Pro” version and the “Enterprise” version, but I think it is fair to say that many of the features available in SurveyGizmo aren’t even available in many of the paid packages I’ve tried.

SurveyGizmo allows you to choose from around 20 different “themes” which let you control the color scheme and the general look and feel of your survey. You can have your questions appear in whatever font you choose, and you can add your logo to the top — even for the free surveys. If that’s not enough customization for you, SurveyGizmo gives you direct access to the survey page’s underlying HTML template and the CSS file used to control how your page looks. Most survey packages make it difficult to get this level of control…

If you sign up for an account, you also get access to response quotas, auto-close on date, vote protection (de-duping), forward-only surveys, URL variable patterns, and IP-based geotracking. With the Enterprise version you can also eliminate the “powered by” icon that appears on the page.

Launching your survey is very easy and the system lets you go back and edit it at any time. Every survey has it’s own custom URL, and you have the option of creating your own custom survey URL as well. Surveys can easily be embedded into your web site and all of the code is provided for you. Special code is provided so that you can embed the entire first page of your survey into a MySpace page, an e-mail blast, or just into a page on your web site.

SurveyGizmo will send out survey invitations for Personal, Por and Enterpise accounts (not for free accounts). Upload a list, and the software makes it fairly easy to track who has taken your survey. You can also send out followup invitations.

Data can be exported in either text format or as a CSV file (no SPSS option except in the Enterprise version). One neat feature is that all data is saved on their server until you delete it (not automatically deleted after a certain period). SurveyGizmo offers an external database sync which allows you to send/receive information to outside websites and databases.

Reporting is extremely flexible — you can create multiple reports for each survey including charts, graphs and crosstabs. All account types can filter reports by date range, although only paid accounts can filder data by responses.

SurveyGizmo Pro and Enterprise allow for multiple user accounts (5 accounts for Pro, 20 accounts for Enterprise). Permissions can be user based, and team-based permissions (where groups of users can be partitioned) is also available. Surveys can also be secured to ensure privacy, although media (such as videos and pictures) cannot be secured using the software.

SurveyGizmo offers a variety of tutorials (some of them as videos) on how to use the software, ranging from how to create a new survey to personalizing your survey to details on some of the more unique advanced features. In addition, SurveyGizmo has a very active support forum with over 2000 posts one of which is dedicated to new feature requests.

SurveyGizmo is available is four flavors: “Free,” which gives you access to all of the basic features, the ability to create an unlimited number of surveys but only allows you to collect 250 responses a month; “Personal” which costs $19 and offers 1,000 responses a month plus some of the more advanced features; “Pro” which comes iwth 5,000 responses a month and “Enterprise” which comes with up to 50,000 responses a month (that’s a lot of responses).

I really like SurveyGizmo. I like the clean interface, the variety of features and the fact that it appears that they are constantly updating it with new capabilities. I can say with a great deal of confidence that I will be using this survey package for my own future projects and may even consider the enterprise version for larger applications. Certainly, if you’re doing a simple project for school or for your internal organization, I would recommend the free version of SurveyGizmo over either SurveyMonkey or any of the other free applications out there.

• SurveyGizmo