CleverForm - Online surveys, customer profiling and email marketing technology and services

Last october CleverForm fielded an "Internet usage and satisfaction survey" for PC Magazine. It was a 12-page survey with more than 35 questions related to variuos aspects of Internet usage. The survey was completed by almost 1,000 people from PC Mag's opt-in group in record time:
70 in the first hour, over 400 during first day,
and almost 500 more in the next 10 days !!!
It was agreed with PC Magazine that the survey is to be taken offline on Dec.1st, otherwise the response rate should be even bigger.

The survey was a tremendous success: the response rate of 42.9% and drop-out rate less than 2% (the people who have begun completing the survey, but never finished) , made Mr. Ben Gottesmann, executive editor, very satisfied and keen to work with CleverForm in the future, and almost 90% of the people who participated in this survey stated that they would participate in similar surveys in the future.

Here's what Mr. Gottesman had to say in an interview given for CleverForm newsletter:

I received a press release from CleverForm a few months ago. I receive dozens of press releases each day and I try to read each one. I’ve always been interested in survey and research tools, so this caught my eye.

Q2. Your prevous experiences with similar services (esp. response rate, reliability, ease of use ...)

We’ve tried a few different tools over the past couple of years. There are some decent software-based tools which have decent authoring environments, but they require that you host them yourself. This is often impractical since we don’t have the resources to manage the servers and the potential influx of traffic. (pcmag.com, our web site, has tremendous capacity, but this typically isn’t available to the print editorial staff for small projects.) I’ve looked at other web-based tools but they often are lacking some important feature such as branching or the ability to restrict the number of times a respondent answers a survey.

I was impressed what I saw in the online demonstration and the links CleverForm had sent me, so I had reasonably high expectations.

Q4. General impressions on CleverForm survey design phase, from question creation until deployment....and the role support played during design

I was very impressed with how easy it was to create an attractive, thorough survey. Because my time was very limited, I ended up turning over nearly all of the creation to Branko (member of CleverForm staff). He was wonderfully responsive. It was a fun challenge working together across the ocean over ICQ, and it turned out great. Branko was very responsive to my questions and was available even on weekends for me.

Q5. Your personal impression on CleverForm as a tool, and on long-term benefits of its usage?

I’m very impressed with CleverForm. It has a good balance of ease and power. Despite the fact that the survey was hosted in England and nearly all of the respondents were in the US, the survey pages were very responsive. After I get a chance to work with support staff a little more to understand the coding tricks they did in the survey, I can see PC Magazine frequently using CleverForm. We’re always looking for ways to stay in touch better with our readers and this gives us a great way to do it.

I was very surprised at the response rate, since we didn’t offer any incentive to the respondents for completing the survey. Typically we offer a free Palm PDA or similar, but not this time. Still, we had a few hundred responses from the 2200 people who we surveyed within the first few hours, in spite of, or perhaps because, we deployed the survey on a holiday weekend. We only fielded the survey for about 10 days and still had nearly a 50% response rate.

Q7. Your thoughts about CF analyses features, and interesting result-related findings in general...

I had a little difficulty with the results module. This was possibly due to a slow server and my own impatience (I wasn’t waiting for pages to finish loading), but the issue was addressed by adding “Loading Page” to the pages and improving the underlying code. The analysis tools were very nice, although I can see a few areas where they can be enhanced. For instance, I wasn’t able to do a logical “OR” on a cross tab, although the option seemed to be available elsewhere. I’d also like to be able to export results from presentation mode to CSV or XLS so I can easily incorporate them into other documents.

Q8. Have you had any feedback from respondents, your colleagues ... and what was it ?

Actually the lack of feedback coupled with the high response rate showed us that respondents found the survey very easy to complete. My colleagues were impressed with the tool and the ease with which we deployed it. We’re looking forward to using it for other projects.

Q9. Would you have changed anything in your survey if you had to field it again ?

There are a few questions that I’d change, but for the most part, it achieved what I had hoped for.

We are very pleased and impressed with CleverForm, and Branko and the rest of the team and we’re looking forward to working with you again in the near future.

PC Magazine's "Notes on Internet usage" survey

PC Magazine's
"Notes on Internet usage"
survey