Zoomerang recently announced the creation of a new "Education Resource Center" which will provide practical tips and best practices to educators interested in revitalizing their academic initiatives. The program, which is closely integrated with Zoomerang’s online survey service, is designed to give educators the tools they need to use survey research to drive curriculum decisions and increase student performance; incorporate faculty imput into the decision-making process while increasing teacher satisfaction; and eliminate cumbersome paper processing allowing educators to spend more time on classrom development.

Visit the Zoomerang Education Research Center

Read the full press release at Yahoo Business

Perseus Development Corporation and WebSurveyor, combined under a newly formed holding company funded by Austin Ventures, announced today they were selected as a winner of the CRM Rising Star award by the editors of CRM Magazine. Perseus Development Corporation is the originator and leading provider of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) solutions, while WebSurveyor is the leading provider of online survey software for business professionals.

Read more at the Boston Daily Business News.

SurveyZ is an entirely web-based, self-service internet survey system developed and operated by Utah-based Qualtrics. It offers a variety of advanced capabilities, including unique survey questions, branching, looping, piping, trigger-based responses and form grading as well as an unparalleled collection of pre-written surveys that you can borrow questions from or use as the basis for your own surveys. The design and organization of the SurveyZ survey development environment isn’t particularly impressive (it looks like something out of 1998), and the design options for the surveys themselves are fairly limited — yet the design process is fairly smooth and even the most complex surveys can be created by individuals with very little experience. SurveyZ has a built in e-mail invitation system and a very limited reporting engine. All in all, if you’re looking for a survey system that can do just about anything and you don’t care so much about design or reporting, SurveyZ may have everything you need.

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Opinio 5 is a well-designed, easy to use and highly customizable internet survey system published by Oslo, Norway based ObjectPlanet. The software, which is available both as a hosted service and as an application you can install on your own web server, offers all of the major features you would expect to find in a moderately advanced packaged with a few very powerful and interesting extras (and a couple of notable deficits). It is perfect for a corporate research department or organization with users at several levels — novice will find it fairly easy to create smart looking surveys very quickly, while more advanced users will be able to control precisely how the surveys look and feel. Opinio also offers a highly configurable reporting engine that for some applications may completely replace the need to examine the results in an outside data analysis package. The software is well priced, extensible, and is definitely worthy of consideration for any midsized research department looking for a flexible, easy to manage internet survey package.

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ResearchExec, owned and operated by the Fairfield, Connecticut based company of the same name, is an entirely web-based survey system that is available either as a hosted solution or as a package you can install on your own server. It offers a tremendous amount of customizability as well as a number of advanced features such as the ability to set quotas for individual questions and advanced survey logic. It has integrated panel management that allows you to send surveys to specific members based on their responses to previous surveys. The survey development system, while elegantly designed and extremely flexible, is tedious to use and does not play well with FireFox 1.5 or Internet Explorer 7 RC1. It offers very little in terms of a reporting system, and you should expect to do most of your analysis in a separate program such as Excel or SPSS. Because of the focus on advanced features, the sharper learning curve and the lack of a reporting engine, ResearchExec is more likely to appeal to users at a professional research firm and not those looking for a quick easy way to produce and report on internet research.

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Beeliner Surveys is a simple, easy-to-use and extremely inexpensive online survey service operated by Cambridge, Massachusetts based @Spinfish Web/ROG. Although its survey capabilities and design flexibility are very limited, the system is very easy to use and it includes some very unique and useful features, such as the ability to include full surveys within e-mail messages and create custom reports that can be saved and reused. While the program does have some security issues and while it does very much limit your options in terms of the types of questions you can ask, organizations looking to conduct a quick and easy survey may find the program does what they need at a price they can afford.

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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. 

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There are a lot of excellent internet web interviewing packages out there. Since it is unlikely that I will personally have time to review, compare and contrast every one of them, I’ve compiled some of the criteria I consider when evaluating internet survey software systems including questions I ask about basic capabilities, advanced survey related capabilities, design/development features, user experience related elements, response management capabilities, reporting capabilities, pricing, system requirements and available support and training. (more…)

SurveyCore is a fairly simple web-based survey system that provides a range of basic features including multiple question types, multi-page surveys, and even some moderately advanced features such as piping and branching. Design capabilities are limited, and the fact that it does not provide an off-line editing module may be annoying to those who are not always connected to the Internet. The system does feature a built-in e-mail invitation/tracking module, and it offers an interesting reporting system that may prove useful especially for ongoing studies. While the system is not overly expensive compared to some advanced systems, it may be out of the price range for many who may be satisfied with the feature set.

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In the July, 2006 issue of the Market Research Society’s Research Magazine, Tim Macer reviewed Perseus SurveySolutions 2.0, a multi-user online survey solution with integrated sampling, invitation management, report preparation and publishing, which is aimed at large enterprises wishing to consolidate and co-ordinate all their research and feedback activities.

Tim liked the Word-like interface for designing surveys, the centrally controlled ‘profiles’ that allow direct links to enterprise databases to provide "real-time and moment-of-truth sampling" and the simple results portal; he didn’t like the fact that there was no intelligent support for coding or consolidating open-ended data, the limited range of statistics, and the fact that it was labourious working with open-ends.

Read Tim Macer’s full review of Perseus Survey Solutions EFM 2.0

In the May, 2006 issue of issue of the Market Research Society’s Research Magazine, Tim Macer reviewed Merlinco’s MerlinPlus, a powerful end-user analysis suite which can be fed either by surveys in industry-standard formats or by data collected using built-in modules for web surveys, handheld CAPI, touchscreen self-completion or simple standalone CATI.

Tim liked the easy but versatile analysis and cross-tab capabilities, the support for touchscreen kiosk interviewing applications and the fact that it is easy to import or export data in many formats and that it outputs directly to MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for reports. He disliked the fact that there were no charting capabilities and less than friendly file management system.

Read Tim Macer’s full review of Merlinco’s MerlinPlus.