E18: Leveraging An Online Survey Tool To Scale Impact (Typeform)

What I talk about in this episode:

If you would like to learn how to scale impact by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course – https://nxtstep.io/impact

Episode Transcript
0:18 – Hey everyone Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is one of my favorite, no code or low code tools of all time, and that is called Typeform. 

0:28 – Now I’m going to explain more about what this tool is, but before I get into that, what I want to share with you is that most of the time when organizations are looking to get data from someone, a key part of what they want to do in terms of scaling impact, if they’re looking to leverage software and technology, I’ve talked about the importance of considering what’s become this vast and diverse world of really flexible, powerful tools that you can use without writing any code or knowing a lot or really anything about software engineering and Typeform is one of the best examples of that, in my opinion, and it serves one of the most important needs when it comes to what it is you may be trying to do using software technology and that’s get data from someone.

1:12 – Now in this case, we may be talking about your clients, the beneficiaries of your nonprofit programs and if you’re truly trying to scale impact, chances are you’re probably trying to reach a wider audience, software and technology can help you do that. And as part of that process, oftentimes you need data from them. So how are you going to get it? Chances are you’ve considered trying to do so from a survey tool. Now, there’s plenty of them out there. But my favorite is Typeform. I’m going to going to talk more about why. But key is you’re trying to get data from them. So a survey tool makes a lot of sense. Something that can be done online, from a phone from a computer from a laptop, whatever. 

1:56 – Some of the important elements here to consider is how important what’s considered the user experience or UX in this case, the more intuitive it is to use which essentially is a better way of saying how easy the tool may be, the better, right? We may have users or clients that have vastly different levels of familiarity with technology and so the easier it is to use, the more successful you’re going to be able to get that data or for it to serve whatever purpose it is that you need. 

2:25 – Now, another key element here and this is particularly important when we’re talking about the nonprofit world is it needs to be flexible across platforms. Now when I say platforms, what I mean is different types of devices, internet connected devices, someone might use to access your form, in this case, and what’s most typically considered is either a laptop or a desktop or a mobile phone or a smartphone device. Now, the reason why this is obviously so important is because there are many clients, the terms of who’s going to be benefiting from your program or what it is you’re trying to do to scale impact that may only have access to a phone they may not have a laptop or a computer. We’ve seen this before and the work that I do with a nonprofit organizations that I help scale impact through software as we have to handle for these considerations. So being able to work on a phone is critically important if you want to reach many clients that do not have access to a laptop or a desktop. So the ability to operate on a phone and look good on a phone is really important and not all tools do that. Some tools claim that they do that but they don’t do it particularly well. So that’s critically important when we’re considering this and Typeform in my opinion does it better than most. It is a very intuitive, very user friendly tool to use and it looks great on a mobile device. It gives you a similar experience of using a native app or a native application on the phone. But it isn’t it’s still web based, which is even more convenient for you. So having said that, like I mentioned there’s a lot of tools out there that claim to do a lot when it comes to surveys and forms like Google Forms for example, but I find that the one that provides the most value and best features is Typeform.

4:14 – So obviously for the first part of it, it’s about getting the data from your clients and we want to use the tool to be able to do that, but then it quickly becomes what are we going to do with this data? What are we connecting this to next? So that’s the other side of this equation and that’s another reason why I’m a big fan of Typeform because it integrates with so many systems and platforms and it is one of the most flexible and versatile tools for connecting it and the data that you’re getting with another system. They’ve got a ton of native integrations supported right through the tool and even if you don’t have a native integration that you can connect to directly from Typeform, that list is growing and expanding every day. It natively integrates with Zapier, which I’ve talked about another episode as well too, which you can kind of think of is this universal connector and another no code tool. So you can use Zapier to connect anything to anything and they have an even bigger inventory because that’s their specific purpose. They’re designed to take system A and connect to the System B. So Typeform has a bunch of their native integrations but it also connects to Zapier. So if it what you’re trying to connect to you don’t see it natively supported directly through Typeform. Chances are you could find a way to connect through Zapier so that basically just explodes the amount of the list and in terms of the number and the volume of other systems that you can connect to which is makes the tool that much more valuable for you and what you’re trying to do in scaling impact. 

5:48 – So I talked about a couple of things that I think are really important when considering a tool like this. It serves a very important purpose. It’s got great usability, and it’s super versatile in terms of what it integrates with. I want to share with you an example of how I used a similar tool type form in order to dramatically scale impact. A client of mine wanted to take essentially the enrollment process in terms of how they were enrolling clients into their nonprofit program from offline to online. We ended up using a tool like this in order to be able to do that and Typeform provides a great example in order to give you the ability to achieve something like this for all the reasons that I previously mentioned and long story short, the results that we were able to achieve in a very short period of time we were able to get a tool like Typeform up and online in a matter of days to weeks. So we’re not talking about months or years. We’re talking about a very short period of time. Ultimately, after we review the results in terms of what we were able to do, it resulted in us being able to enroll 200 to 300% more clients in less than half the time. So if you’re keeping track of the multiples there, that’s anywhere from four to six times or 400% 600% improvement when you consider both the volume, the multiple of clients that were able to enroll and the dramatic time savings and that we were able to give them more than half of their time back which is just unbelievable. So that’s that’s kind of the idea here, right? And that’s the idea that you may be trying to achieve or something related to that terms of scaling impact at your nonprofit organization. And that’s how a tool like Typeform can help you do it without needing to know how to or need to write any code.