Marketing Survey Tool - free surveying tool

Marketing Survey Tool is a simple tool for creation of advanced online surveys Basically, what I've done, are PHP-scripts for creation of advanced surveys with fancy features like branching/skipping logic, random sequence of questions etc. + script for displaying these surveys + scripts for downloading data in plain text (e.g. comma delimited data files) so that survey could be imported into standard statistical tools like SPSS or SAS and evaluated.
The idea is to provide an easy tool for people who don't know much about programming, but who do know enough about research/creation of surveys. The tool is in constant development, so you can expect further features.
Having said what is this tool for, I just add what this tool isn't for :-)
This tool is not for simple pools. If you need to ask your users one question you better find something else. This tool is for creation of surveys and collecting of data and not for evaluation. If you expect some eye candy graphs you need to look somewhere else, because it's for people who are able to analyze collected data, or who are willing to learn it. Graphs are for newbies and top management ;-)

Surveyworld - Community for researchers

Since my surveying tool requires certain knowledge in research, I decided to add to this project a community for researchers to provide basic help for people starting online surveying. I (and hopefully others) will post articles regarding the fine art of surveying in the support section of the site.
The deep understanding of surveying, formulating questions, evaluation, etc. can help you get plausible survey results. The forum should teach the inexperienced users how to create a good survey because I think that surveys created without previous consideration can have only entertaining value. I encourage you to take your time and prepare everything very carefully. Remember, that every word in your question counts. "Do you like it?" and "Do you dislike it?" are completely different questions, which would give you different results.
This site can be also a great place for sharing your surveying ideas with other experienced researchers.

Maintenance Version Released

The version 1.2.05 is a maintenance version of the stable line of MST. Actually now I'm more interested in the new MST line, but since it will take some time before it will be available, I've decided to make this maintenance release to correct a minor bugs reported by Stanislav Antov (deletion of single user). If you use 1.2.04 version, just replace the files and everything should be ok.

Posted on: Wed 08 Mar 2006 21 : 13 : 30

Three years of Marketing Survey Tool.

It has been three years already from the day in which the 1st version of my tool has been created. The first version was quite crappy. It was named 1.0b and it missed quite a lot of current features. The pages were hardcoded, the administration panel was real pain in ***, it consumed a lot of resources, the PostgreSQL layer wasn't even tested and it had quite few bugs which made it inappropriate for use in production environment. Nevertheless the branching logic draw much attention and I got almost instantly positive feedback from the community. From the beginning the communities' e-mails and posts were main motivation for me to continue developing this tool. I remember the first referrals I have seen. The first ever traffic on my page from the page of someone using my tool came from some erotic website...Not exactly what I expected, but hey, I was happy anyway that someone was using it. The next referral I remember came from the IT support pages of the University of South Carolina. I went to see their survey and I had seen that they modified the page for displaying of survey by adding the header. First I was like huh...but I liked it, I liked it much. Their page looked so nice, so although if the newest release was few days old I instantly felt that it's just a start and I will need to change a lot. Later, almost every time I felt that my tool is perfect someone pointed me to some flaws or "must have" features I didn't think about...I guess it must be Murphy law.
During these years I earned quite a lot of experience, few bucks from Google ads (I still think that there is something pervert in the fact that I get paid when someone does NOT find what he/she is looking for on my site and goes for something advertised) and great feeling when you see something you created actually working.
The tool has been downloaded almost 7000 times (actual counter is missing some downloads which were lost by moving to another host), I got over 200 mails of feedback/questions from the users, I was named in someone's PhD thesis and I know also of few users using my tool in their bachelors thesis. Lately I don't have much time to work on the tool, but I want to release 2.0 version. After that I will probably consider making it truly Open Source.

Posted on: Wed 09 Nov 2005 23 : 40 : 45

Problems

The company my site is hosted on moved to a new server. Sorry for problems you might have been experiencing during the last few days. Most of it is already solved, and the others will be corrected soon.

Posted on: Fri 03 Jun 2005 09 : 28 : 17

New Release

The MST 1.2.04 release is a 1.2.03 release with few bugs fixed. The fixes for these bugs were available at least since February. Sorry for not updating the source files before, but as I said, I have quite limited access to this page while abroad. This time I made only tar.gz files. All modern Windows unzip application should be also able to unpack this archives.

Posted on: Mon 12 Apr 2004 15 : 35 : 18

Updates of this page

Actually I'm still abroad (Newcastle, UK). I probably come back to Poland in two months. While abroad I have a limited access to internet and to this page, so some parts of this website may be not up to date. I promise to change it as soon as I come back.

Posted on: Mon 12 Apr 2004 15 : 34 : 32