I caught up with Johnny Yeip over at Competitor Group in San Diego, one of our most loyal customers. They’ve been with us since 2007, and we love ‘em for it.
[Competitor owns Competitor Magazine, Triathlete, and Women’s Running, as well as 83 international events including the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon Series, ING KiDS ROCK Series, REI Muddy Buddy Adventure Series and the TriRock Triathlon Series.
Also within the Competitor Group is Boulder-based cycling magazine Velo News (shout out to our neighbors down the street!) as well as the Denver Rock and Roll Marathon, which I’m sure at least a few of us at SurveyGizmo will be doing again this year.]
SG: I know Competitor Group as a publisher of Triathlete, one of my favorite magazines, and a few others as well, but also as an event producer for competitive races all over the country. So it’s great to be able to support those endeavors. But I want to hear from you Johnny – what kinds of things have you been using surveys for?
JY: So we use SurveyGizmo in two different use cases. One is more for what it was designed for. We do a lot of post event surveys. We produce running events all over the US and Europe, so after an event we’ll send out a survey to the participants.
We also use it as a lead-gen form for email, online registration for events and expos, and any contest or sweepstakes we use SurveyGizmo for. I even wrote an HTML generator that uses SurveyGizmo as the front end.
SG: You guys are using it for all kinds of things.
JY: Yeah, definitely. It’s out of the box, I guess, but basically anywhere we need to capture data online, we use SurveyGizmo. It’s sort of been this Swiss Army knife for us.
SG: Once that data is collected, is it being utilized? Are the research efforts and feedback from post-event surveys directly affecting change?
JY: Yeah, it makes its way into presentations. I don’t manage that arm. We use that [data] along with Net Promoter, to get a sense of customer satisfaction to see how we did at each of our events; maybe what we could do differently, new things we might not have thought of, things like that. It is definitely being used to drive change.
SG: So regarding scale, how many respondents are we talking about? Hundreds? Thousands?
JY: Tens of thousands. So each of our events can run anywhere from ten thousand participants up to forty thousand at some of our bigger events. If we did a survey to all of our customers, that would be 600,000, or more.
SG: Johnny, thanks for taking the time to chat. We’re all big fans of what you guys are doing over at Competitor and stoked to be a part of it, even if only in small way.
Check out the Competitor Group website to learn more about their publications and the company behind so many great races you may already participate in.