Import your Contacts from Outlook and Invite them to Take Your Online Survey

Posted in: Blog, Tips and Tricks by admin on December 11, 2009 | No Comments

While we personally like just using google apps for our emails, a huge percentage of our customers use Microsoft Outlook. So, today, we’re going to talk to you about how to import your contacts from Microsoft Outlook and send them all survey invites

1) First thing’s first… please head on over to our “publish” page:

2) Once you’re there, click on the “invite” tab:

3) Now click on the “New Contact” button:

4) Once you do this, you will see a popup screen. Please click on “Add From My Address Book”

5) This will in turn open up another pop-up. Select “Outlook or Outlook Express” from this list and then click on the “Next” button.

6) Now, if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, continue reading. If not, skip to step 7. You will now be requested to install an Active-X plugin so that the software can grab your contacts from Microsoft Outlook:

7) If you don’t have Microsoft Internet Explorer as your browser, you will see a prompt to upload your Outlook CSV file. In order to upload this file, you first have to create it by exporting our Outlook Contacts in CSV format. If you don’t know how, don’t worry. We talk about this in another blog post entitled: How to Export Your Contacts from Microsoft Outlook in CSV format.

8 – Now, you will see your imported contacts. Please choose the ones that you’d like to import and then press “Next”.

9) Now just click on the “Done” button:

10) You will now see the contacts you choose in the blue dialog. Simply press “Add Contacts” and you’re done

How to Export Your Contacts from Outlook and Outlook Express into CSV Format

Posted in: Blog, Tips and Tricks by admin on | No Comments

A few of our customers have recently been asking us how they can export their contacts from Microsoft Outlook so that they can Upload them onto FluidSurveys in order to send them invites. For this reason, we’re going to spend the time to talk about this in this blog post:

1) Go ahead and open up Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. Now click on the “File” Menu and then on “Import and Export”:

2) Now choose “Comma Separated Values” and then press “Next”:

3) Now click on “Contacts” and then press “Next”

4) Now type in a file name or choose a location for your file using the “browse” button and then press next.

5) Press “Next” one more time…

6) You’ll now see a progress bar… depending on how many contacts you have, this may take a while… but afterwards, you’re done!

How long will it take to complete this survey? Survey Design Tips

Posted in: Blog, Tips and Tricks by admin on December 2, 2009 | No Comments

One of the things that we do here at FluidSurveys is help our customers out with their survey design. While we don’t formally advertise this, from time to time we do get requests to take a look at surveys to see if we have any suggestions. We like doing this because it’s a lot of fun as far as we’re concerned

One of the things that we notice often is that in order to get more survey responses, some users tend to under-estimate how long a survey will take to complete and then they advertise this “short” period of time. For example, we’re sure that you’ve gotten survey invitations that say, this will only take “2-3 minutes”… if it’s not true, it’s not a good idea to say it

Now, how do you go about figuring out how long a survey will take to complete? Well, the most important thing is that you can’t put yourself in another person’s shoes and assume how long it will take to complete the survey. To get an idea of how long it will take, you should really try getting someone in your target audience to take the survey and see how long it takes them to do so. How can you do that? Well, the good news is that FluidSurveys will actually tell you how long it took someone to complete a survey. A good idea would be to send the survey to a small group of your target audience in order to measure how long it will take. Once you’ve done this, you can then proceed to put in a correct estimate as to how long the survey will take to complete.

Why go through this trouble? When you tell your audience that a survey will take 2-3 minutes, after that period of time, they will start to get get nervous and will either stop mid way or this process will put them in a state of mind that will negatively affect your results – i.e. they might want to rush through.

Have Multiple People Publish/Distribute Your Online Survey

Posted in: Blog, Tips and Tricks by admin on November 5, 2009 | No Comments

A few of our customers have recently come to us asking for a solution where they could have multiple people deploy their survey. This is best explained by example. Assume that you are the federal government and that you need to do a survey of all university professors in the country. However, you can’t know who actually takes the surveys. The problem is that you don’t know who these professors are (i.e. you don’t have their contact info) and yet you need to invite them to take this survey (and their info is private so you can’t get access to it).

What is the solution?

1) Once you create the survey, you can add a survey “publisher” from each university who will be responsible for inviting all of the professors from that university.
2) Each survey publisher will import the list of email addresses of the university professors in their university and then send them invites using the FluidSurveys invite tool.
3) Because each publisher has access to only their invitees, not only will they be able to send out invites, but they will also be able to send out reminders and such…
4) The publishers won’t have access to the survey results (unless you specifically decide to give them access).
5) Once all the invites have gone out, you can see all of the responses that are entered – in real time

So, how do you make all of this happen? Through our survey role management feature. This comes by default on our enterprise plans but if you need to use it and the enterprise plan is more than what you need (or just out of your budget), give us a call and we can see what we can do for you.

Tip for Analyzing Your Survey Data Using Graphs and Cross-Tabulations

Posted in: Blog, Tips and Tricks by admin on August 29, 2009 | No Comments

Very recently, one of our users deployed a survey successfully and then wanted to use our survey analytics tools to analyze the retrieved data. The problem was that one of the questions that they had asked was “How Old Are You?”. Not that there’s anything wrong with asking that question, but, they had asked this question by using a “text response question”. In other words, respondents would type in their ages into the text field. The problem arises when you try to graph such data or use it in a cross tab. Some of the respondents ended up typing in “50 years old” while others may have written “forty-five” while another person may have written “forty five” (i.e. without the “-”). As you can imagine, because this data has no uniformity, it can’t be used in a graph or in a cross-tab. If this question were to be used in graphs/cross-tabs, it would have had to be posed as “Choose the age-range that you are in from the choices below” and been asked as a drop-down or multiple choice question. If the question would have been posed as such, there would have been a lot more that could’ve been done with the analytics tools.

Takeaway: Don’t use text response question types if you intend to analyze that data using graphs / cross-tabs.