Untitled Document

in this issue

Zoom Tips
	Testing surveys prior to launch Limiting survey responses
Real Life Zoom
	Case Study: 360° surveys and Zoom Case Study: L.A. County of Education
Survey Expert
	Effective use of rating scale questions
zSample
	Need respondents for your surveys?
New Zoom Knowledge Base
	How to best use the new Zoom KB

We are introducing some new sections in the Zoomerang newsletter designed to provide you with practical, ‘how to’ information. Zoom Tips focuses on frequently asked ‘How Do I’ questions, while Real Life Zoom presents Zoomerang case studies we hope you will find interesting.

Have an interesting use of Zoomerang you would like to share with the Zoom community? Please let us know. We would love to feature you in our upcoming newsletters.

Do you have any ideas for what you'd like to see in our newsletter? Please let us know your suggestions for upcoming newsletters.

Zoom Tip: How do I send a test survey prior to launch?

We recommend that you always, always, always pre-test your surveys. Pre-testing can help you find unexpected question interpretations and other errors that may make your data invalid. Obviously, catching these problems upfront can prevent major headaches later on. Ideally, you should pre-test to a small subset of your target survey recipients. If that isn’t possible, at least send it out to a few friendly survey takers who aren’t too close to the project to be able to give good feedback.

	To pre-test a survey using Zoomerang:
	1.	Create a survey exactly as you would like it
	2.	Create a copy of this survey and rename it something meaningful such as “Customer Satisfaction Survey (pre-test)”
	3.	Deploy the copy to the test recipients
	4.	Gather feedback and modify originalas necessary. If significant changes are required you may want to test again before going live

For additional information on pre-testing surveys, check out our Zoom Knowledge Base Article: How do I send a test survey prior to the final launch?

Zoom Tip: How do I limit responses to one per person?

To limit your responses to only one per person you need to deploy your survey using the Zoomerang email list functionality. This way we can track who gets the survey and more importantly, who responds. In order to ensure that a survey taker can respond only once, check the box at the bottom of the Survey Addressing page. To read more and see a screen shot check out our Zoom Knowledge Base Article: Can I limit responses to one per person?

Real life Zoom: Zooming into Focus with 360° Surveys

Guest author: Dr. Nick Horney, President, Agility Consulting (www.agilityconsulting.com)
Contact Dr. Horney: NickHorney@triad.rr.com

360° Surveys and Their Popularity. The past decade resulted in a dramatic increase in the introduction and use of 360° surveys for capturing data primarily for individual development.

The boss used to be the sole judge of performance and potential. For many organizations, the boss does not have the complete picture in terms of an employee’s performance and has to rely on feedback from others working more closely with the employee. The process of 360° feedback was designed to increase the accuracy of that assessment and make it more relevant to the development of each employee. The term "360° feedback" refers to a delicate process in which employees get feedback from "relevant others." Rather than take the word of one person -- who, for any number of reasons may not be able to see the person’s skills clearly nor evaluate them objectively -- this process includes the voices of all relevant parties.

A good metaphor for a 360° survey is a videotaped analysis of your swing, from multiple camera angles, by a golf or tennis coach. Just like this example of a “swing analysis” in sports, organizations have used the 360° survey to capture multiple-rater perspectives on skills important to job success.

Full Story

Real life Zoom: Los Angeles County of Education

Challenge
Bob Tyra, a consultant for the Los Angeles County of Education, decided he wanted to conduct a Customer Satisfaction Survey. Bob's group provides a variety of services to support services professionals, such as guidance counselors, psychologists, nurses, and school administrators across 81 school districts in Los Angeles County. Services they provide include legislative updates, mental health guidance and attendance review. The challenge Bob faced is that this type of survey had never been done before. Bob wanted to understand which services were most valuable to their widespread users and what they did to prioritize efforts going forward.

Bob convinced his manager, the Division Director, that a customer service survey would be a good idea. He had heard of Zoomerang and was convinced that using an online survey tool would yield better results than a standard paper survey. Bob planned to launch his survey in February, which he knew could help get a good response rate. It would also make administration on his end easier to use an online survey as there weren’t a lot of resources available for this pilot survey and paper surveys usually entailed lots of collation time.

Bob deployed his survey in February of 2003. Surveys were deployed via email, county wide as well as people in Bob’s own county office (over 4,000 employees). The survey was short, less than 10 questions, asking a few key customer satisfaction questions including information on which services were valuable, prioritization of services and how users best liked to receive services (workshop, email, newsletter etc.).

Results
Bob was extremely pleased that the response rate quintupled over the typical surveys the group had conducted in the past. Bob was especially gratified to find out that the group had a 90% satisfaction rating. This had the ancillary benefit of boosting team morale once publicized to the group. Even more importantly, Bob was able to take the survey results to various meetings and use the information to set strategy and agenda for the group. He notes that it was “easy to use graphics from Zoomerang to quickly create a results overview report."

In fact, this survey was so successful that other Los Angeles County education employees were interested in conducting their own surveys. Bob’s job now involves training other employees on conducting surveys using Zoomerang.

Recent examples include surveys such as:

		Identifying what students are doing after graduation (college, work, vocational school)
		Workshop efficacy - what skills were learned by students after taking a career preparation workshop

Bob’s tips for a successful survey:

		Keep your surveys short! People are busy.
		Make sure you tell people how long it will take to take the survey – and if you say less than 5 minutes make sure it really is less than 5 minutes
		Keep the response time window short – no more than two weeks – this helps train people to answer right away
		Don’t hesitate to use humor…one recent survey wasn’t getting the response rate he needed so he utilized Zoomerang’s reminders with a catchy email subject line: “American Idol 200 million responses, our survey 38”.
		Share the responses with survey participants – people like to know how others have answered and how they compare

Survey Expert: Effective use of rating scale questions

Zoom members often ask us questions about good survey practices, so, each newsletter we will feature a tip to keep in mind when creating your surveys:

Rating scales are a great way to measure and compare sets of variables.

		Keep rating scale questions consistent! If you elect to use rating scales (e.g. rate this item on a scale from 1 – 5) keep the scale consistent throughout the survey; use the same number of points on the scale for all rating questions and make sure the meanings of high and low stay consistent. For example, don’t have 1 = Very satisfied in one question and 1 = Very unsatisfied in another question. Switching your rating scale around will confuse survey takers leading to untrustworthy responses.
		Use an odd number of selections in your rating scale to make data analysis easier.
		Avoid too many rating scale prompts in a row. Users find long lists daunting and will often abandon the survey or worse quickly answer on auto-pilot to get through the troublesome section.

Need respondents? zSample

Do you need respondents for a survey you want to send out? We have an extensive database of panelists who have agreed to provide our customers with feedback by taking Zoomerang surveys. Our zSample service is a reliable and cost-effective way to survey highly targeted, opt-in email addresses for your research projects.

Interested in learning more? Click here for zSample information
You will have access to an order form at this link you can use to ask for additional information from an Account Manager.

You can also request information by logging into your account, click Ask A Question. Select Sales/Renewal as the category and Sample/email list purchase as the sub-category. This will route your inquiry to our sample Account Management team, or call +1-415-462-2300.

New Zoom Knowledge Base: How to best use our new KB

As we recently announced, we launched a new customer support and knowledge management tool. We have had a few growing pains (and we thank you for your patience) but overall feedback has been positive! We are continuing to regularly add new items to the Knowledge Base – and to solicit your feedback as to how useful you found a particular item. If there is something you would like to see that isn’t there – please let us know! Login to your account, click support, click ask a question and then provide your feedback.

The Knowledge Base is designed to primarily answer the key “How Do I...” and standard account management questions. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet login to your account and click the support link (upper right hand side).

On our support page you will have access to our Knowledge Base items. Even our long term Zoom users have reported learning some cool, new things about Zoomerang from perusing the knowledge base.

In addition, you can subscribe to a knowledge base item. If there is something you are particularly interested in and want to make sure you receive the latest update just open the knowledge base item and click the ‘Notify Me by E-Mail if this Answer is Updated’ and we will notify you when the item has been changed.

The My Stuff tab allows you to track questions you logged with Customer Service. Please note: You should ALWAYS log your email inquiries via the support link. This allows us to better track your inquiries and you will always have a record of what you have asked and how we have responded.

Thanks for using Zoomerang!

Do you have an interesting use of Zoomerang you would like to share with the Zoom community? Please click here and let us know. We would love to feature your story in our upcoming newsletters. General feedback on this newsletter? Click suggestions.

Sincerely,
Dana Meade
Paula Rivers
Directors, Zoomerang