Outsourcing your Decisions: Virtual Focus Groups

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The power of the crowd (Photo: Anirudh Koul)

Whether deciding on a company name, logo, or web page design, we all want some outside feedback.  Unfortunately, sending out sample logos and keeping track of everyone’s feedback can be extremely time consuming and quite frankly, a pain in the ass.  I found a great method that streamlines the external feedback process and therefore your decision making.

Make an online survey!

This post explains, step by step, how to make a quick (and free) online survey (see example here).  With this survey you can simply send your email contacts or Facebook friends a link, and you’ll get easy-to-read feedback (I’m talking graphs) on the questions you ask.  It’s now easier than ever to turn your friends and colleagues into a virtual focus group!

I’ll use the example of when I was trying to decide on a logo for My Local Mountain to show how the process works, but you can really use it to get feedback on virtually anything:

First, go to www.SurveyMonkey.com and create an account.

There are a few different ways to set up the questions for your survey.  The example above uses the top question as an image.  Note that I made subheadings and put all images into one image.  You can do this by inserting each image into a powerpoint document and saving the slide as a JPEG, or, if you’re savvy, using PhotoShop.

For the bottom question I used “Multiple Choice (Only One Answer)” for the question type, and “Display Choices as Buttons (1 column)” for the display format:

Finally, I found that it helps to make two pages, one for the survey, and one thanking the user for their feedback.  Why?  Because if someone clicks “done” from the first page, Survey Monkey sends them an ugly prompt about how they can make their own survey.   Don’t worry, your survey data is recorded each time they click “next” on the first page.  Its also more personal to have a ‘thank you’ page.

When you finish creating your survey, Survey Monkey gives you a link to easily share your survey with friends:

Once you’ve conducted your survey, its time to analyze the results.  Survey Monkey displays this information in a friendly way.  To analyze your results, click on “Analyze” from within the “My Surveys” section:

Now you can see which logo was most popular:

You can see an example of my survey at: http://bit.ly/2O7tYV.

Please note: I have no affiliation with Survey Monkey.  They are just one service that I’ve tried and have found to be the easiest.  If you know of other online survey creators, please leave them in the comments section