If you’re looking to gather survey data, your best bet is usually to hunt in the wild, wherever your prey might be – the mall, the grocery store, just anywhere. 

On your next marketing research adventure, consider using Touch Metric’s Surveyor iPhone app for your mobile polling needs.   Surveyor is free, but it does require participants to download the application and install on their iPhone – something that can be done easily from the phone itself (through the App Store).   Once you, the administrator, create a survey through Touch Metric’s web interface, simply send out the 4-digit invite code and sit back as the data collects.  

To get started, you will need to create a Surveyor account.   This too is free and comes with 600 credits, a custom URL, and a sample survey to guide you through the set-up process.   Questions can be designed to be multiple choice with a single answer, multiple with multiple answers, short form, numbered, URL, email, and conditional.  In other words, no matter how you want participants to answer or what information you are gathering, Surveyor can do it.   

Once you’ve saved your survey, you will need to assign your survey to a device – or who can see/manage what. This is where the credits system comes in.  You can link to all – all surveys, all accounts (for 200 credits), link to a single iPhone device, or create a single account, accessible by any iPhone with the login information.  You can also monitor survey results in real-time from the web interface, viewing answers by user and filtering out certain responses. 

These days, if you’re waiting for everyone to get back to their computer to complete your survey, you may be waiting a long time. Here’s a tool that will help you catch survey respondents wherever they might be, ideally when they’ve a few minutes to take your survey.