Response I recently posted to a question about survey incentives on LinkedIn:

I’ve fielded dozens of online surveys — some with incentives, some without incentives. There is a huge difference in the results that you get — even if your incentive is a sweepstakes-type and the prize isn’t really that significant.

It is important to think about the incentive that you are offering in the context of what it is you are trying to get from the research. For example, offering chocolate chip cookies as an incentive for a survey about how much you like chocolate chip cookies is only going to get you people who want chocolate chip cookies — which is going to obviously skew your results.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t a situation where you couldn’t offer chocolate chip cookies as an incentive for a survey about chocolate chip cookies — if you don’t care whether the respondents are chocolate chip cookie lovers or not — for example, if you had a new kind of chocolate chip cookie and you wanted to compare it to another kind of chocolate chip cookie and all you had available was a panel of chocolate chip cookie lovers…well, chances are you’ll be OK.

I once did a survey once about what *kind* of sweepstakes. For example, would people prefer one big prize or a lot of little prizes (so that the odds of winning would be better). The result was that they actually preferred a middle option — offer a couple of big prizes and a lot of little ones.

The best incentive I’ve ever offered? The chance to win back the value of your order (this was a satisfaction survey for an online store). The response rate was huge. And based on the average transaction value of what we were selling, the risks were minimal.

With all that said, you do need to be careful if you are going to do a sweepstakes type of thing. There are rules. In fact, your sweepstakes has to have rules — type "sweepstakes rules" into Google and you’ll find numerous templates to work with. You’ll note that if you offer anything substantial as a prize you’ll probably want to consult with a lawyer to ensure that you’re not opening yourself up for a massive class action law suit by accidentally breaking one of the rules (it doesn’t happen frequently, but it happen).

Another especially popular incentive that isn’t as frightening and might even drive some more business to your door is to offer some kind of coupon to everyone that completes the survey. A coupon for one of your products — perhaps even a product you’re trying to get rid of. Perhaps they even have to come into your store to claim their reward. That way, everyone is happy.

One final note: know that you don’t always have to offer an incentive. It depends on your subject matter and how much your pool of potential respondents care about you, your business, and potential impact that the results of the survey could have on their lives. If the topic is interesting and/or people feel that the results will have a positive impact on their lives then you probably don’t have to offer an incentive. If the results are mostly going to benefit you and everyone knows it then an incentive is probably in order.

Let’s face it: an online survey is, at its heart, simply a collection of forms. Super long forms with many pages and twisty questions yes, but still forms. And built into the very architecture of the world wide web are the tools that are needed to build forms (and ultimately, surveys). So what is the point of building a service that’s only point is to build forms? Who would use it?

Enter Wufoo.com, the Web 2.0 answer to online forms. Creating forms has really never been so easy or so much fun. Or so much fun to look at. Or so smooth. As someone else pointed out somewhere else, this service makes you wish you had a need for a form so that you could use Wufoo to build it. It really is that neat.

Can you make surveys using Wufoo? Not really. I mean, I suppose if you had a really simple survey that you wanted to execute, you probably could. It does let you do multiple choice questions, open-ended questions, and single-response questions. It even has special fields that help respondents enter prices, addresses, e-mail addresses and dates (all of the things one might regularly enter in a form). But there are also a lot of survey-related things that it doesn’t let you do, like create multiple pages, or validate responses in a meaningful way (other than to require the fields). I would hazard to say that as far as survey capabilities go, SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang have more features, as well as libraries of templates you can use to get you started. These are, after all, programs that were specifically designed to help you create surveys.

One thing that was a little annoying — I spent about five minutes designing a form and clicked the "Themes" button to make it look extra pretty — only to discover that my form had completely disappeared! I had assumed that my changes were being saved as I went and never even noticed the "Save Form" button at the bottom-right corner of the page. Make sure you push it when you are done or your simple survey will end up be simpler than you intended. And then you’ll have to start over from scratch.

With that said, I wish SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, and even the package I use, GMI Net-MR, would take a page from the Wufoo design/survey development book and create an interface that is as fun and as easy to use. I would get a lot more work done.

Wufoo offers a variety of pricing plans, ranging from free accounts (the "gratis" plan) which lets you create 3 forms with up to 10 fields each and accept up to 100 entries a month. The next plan up (the "ad hoc" plan) costs only $9 a month and allows you to have up to 10 forms with an unlimited number of fields and accept up to 500 entries. There is also the "bona fide" account (unlimited forms, 3000 responses a month), the "carpe diem" plan (15,000 responses a month) and the "ad infinitum" plan (no limits, total cost is $199 a month).

And if you are trying to create an online form to collect data, and don’t want to mess around with the basic HTML building blocks, and if you want the chance to play with the newest and greatest of what’s out there, then give Wufoo a try.

• Wufoo.com

A couple of days ago Richard Kassiasieh of Kassblog posted an interesting commentary about Markettools’ Zoomerang product in which he expressed some concern not about the functionality of the service (which he thought was pretty straightforward) but about the branding, pricing, and control one loses over data by using an outside resource.

In terms of the branding, Richard was concerned because the free version of Zoomerang ends with a message inviting respondents to use the system to create their own services, and one could argue that this would be somewhat unprofessional-looking way for a "real" company to end an exchange with a customer (although to be fair, a company that at least goes to the trouble to collect feedback from customers — even free online software — is much better than all of those companies that don’t collect any feedback at all). And to be completely fair, the paid version of Zoomerang does allow you to remove the branding.

But Richard raises a good point — if you are going to go to the trouble of collecting invaluable data from your customers, you at least owe it to yourself to use a process where you control the look and feel of the experience from beginning to end (which, I should again point out, is possible using the paid version of Zoomerang. But even there you need to make sure you change the settings appropriately and test your survey to make sure it looks exactly as you want it to look).

Richard’s second point is that services such as Zoomerang store your data on their servers. This is, of course, true for all web-based survey systems and there is no getting around it unless you only use survey software installed on your own computers that are maintained in your own facilities. You can to some degree mitigate the risk by making sure you understand the level of security and regular backup procedures of the company that you choose to use for your survey research.

Zoomerang doesn’t say precisely how your data is stored other than to indicate that information on members and panelists are stored in "secure databases" protected by passwords, and that data from surveys is stored at "a secure hosting facility with both physical and software-based security systems." For most people, this probably sounds secure enough but if you want to know more and if security really is a concern you may want to contact the provider before you start your survey.

Data retention policies are also important to consider. For example, if you use the free version of Zoomerang they say that your data will only be saved for 10 days following the start of the survey. The impression I get is that they do retain it longer than that and it can be accessed again if you sign up for a paid account, but it is always important to understand the data retention policies before you get started as well as whether or not it will be easy for you to download your data in a managable format when you are finished. Richard expressed concern that Zoomerang only allows a flat file format — well, I think for most people that is probably enough. There are a few services that will allow you to download your survey into a relational file format (such as an Access data file), but these services tend to cost more and frankly I’m not sure what most researchers would ever do with the data in that format anyways. SPSS takes only flat files.

Finally Richard raises the question of cost and why there aren’t more open-source alternatives. He speaks the truth when he notes that survey software isn’t really that hard to write and to that I really don’t have that much of an answer. I imagine it will happen eventually.

• Read Richard’s article about Zoomerang at Kassblog

University of Missouri graduate student Mitch Hardin recently posted a note on his blog about how after spending a lot of quality time with SPSS he switched to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that runs on a variety of platforms (Windows, MacOS, Unix).

Although R is “almost entirely command-line driven,” Mitch likes the fact that it offers more information about what is going on and there are a lot of user-defined function. Personally, I can’t imagine using a command-line to do my stats processing, but then I’m not a big one for getting things done in SPSS syntax either. I couldn’t find much evidence of people using R for marketing research, but the software is free and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work if you needed a powerful statistical package but didn’t want to spend a lot of money.

• Mitch Harden’s post on Somatopsychic
• R Project for Statistical Computing

I came across a post on comp.soft-sys.stat.spss in which the purchaser of a new Dell system with Vista Home Premium edition was unable to install SPSS 13, 14, or 15. They indicate that they spoke to SPSS support, who told them that none of the versions which require activation will install on Vista.

In a follow up message, it was noted that SPSS was working on a patch and that the estimated date of release is the end of April, 2007.

• Read the thread of messages at comp.soft-sys.stat.spss
• SPSS product support matrix

Followup: SPSS has released a hotfix to address the problem. It can be downloaded from the SPSS Support Website (login required — you can use user: guest/password: guest). In addition to the hotfix, the page also identifies the procedure for installing SPSS 15 on Visita.