1. ThinkEvans Easily, Effectively Gathers Information For Clients.
“We do think-tank work and a lot of complex problem-solving,” said Carolyn Evans, the
principal of ThinkEvans consulting in Sydney, Australia. “If a CEO has a problem that his own
staff isn’t equipped to handle, they call us in.”
Their clients vary widely. So do the problems ThinkEvans is called in to solve. Human
resources. Operations. Leadership development. Team structure. Finances. Sales. Most of these
problems can’t be solved without new information. ThinkEvans depends on Key Survey to gather
that information.
“On the growth side, medium-sized companies will say ‘we haven’t got enough people
on the senior executive team, what other functions should we raise up to that level right now?’ Or
they might say, ‘look, our sales are growing but we don’t feel like we’re getting a return on them.
We’ve looked at the finances and they seem right, so where are we going wrong?’” said Evans.
“That takes research to find what’s going on. And often you can do a survey to enquire into what
the staff knows as a way of gathering that information.”
Key Survey’s flexibility helps a lot in this regard. Especially when HR data is being
gathered, it’s important for the respondent to feel safely anonymous. This means that it’s easier
for a third-party firm like ThinkEvans, rather than the respondents’ employer, to gather reliable
data.
“It really helps that we have highly reputable survey software,” Evans said, “and Key
Survey is clearly an established thing in the market. People go away and check out Key Survey
and check out ThinkEvans before they will fill out the survey. We’ve had a lot of commentary to
the effect that ‘Key Survey is so reputable, ThinkEvans is so reputable, and we realize now that
the survey is anonymous and safe to do honestly’. Because Key Survey looks so professional
they’ll assume the whole exercise is legitimate, and so forth. We’ve had a lot of emails saying
‘we’re a bit worried about this survey’, and who have gone ahead and filled out the survey after
checking Key Survey out. It’s very validating.”
Key Survey’s prestige doesn’t just help ThinkEvans look good. It makes their clients
look good. Modern survey technology gives client employees confidence that their company is at
the cutting edge.
“Growing companies,” said Evans, “are trying to spread resources around an expanding
business. Some of them get a lot of commentary from their staff about ‘gee, you guys are up on
the latest, you’re using that Key Survey thing with ThinkEvans’. There’s a reflected credentialing
of the employer as an employer of choice to be using the latest things. Our client looks good
because of this – it’s like, you can’t still have people sitting around using Windows 98 and expect
them to think you’re a good employer. These people see that their employer is keeping up with
much larger organizations, using world-standard software, and that credentials the employer as
well as everybody else in the exercise.”
ThinkEvans applies their own questioning methodology when they use Key Survey. In a
leadership development survey, for example, they don’t ask the standard ‘do you agree or
disagree with this statement’ questions.

2. “We’re looking at the behaviors actually demonstrated by team leaders, for example,”
said Evans. “Everybody thinks good leadership’s a good idea, so they’ll agree with the statement
that ‘your team leader should show good communication skills’ and all those standard sorts of
questions. But when you’re talking about spending money on developing leaders, you need more.
You need to know what behavior they’ve been demonstrating and what they haven’t. So we ask
more specific statements like ‘My team leader communicates well in a small group’, ‘my team
leader avoids taking criticism personally’ or ‘My team leader acts on feedback received.”
Likewise, ThinkEvans’ response categories aren’t simply ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ and so forth.
Since they’re asking how often something is true, the response options have to do with frequency.
The range might go from ‘It’s never true’ to ‘My boss does this so well they should mentor other
people.’
“The custom categories are very easy to make,” said Evans. “It may not be a simple
question, but they’ll read the text and they will actually answer it. That’s what Key Survey really
facilitates.”
This translates into a higher response rate. It also means better responses. Once,
ThinkEvans polled a workplace of 1200 people and received over 850 responses. Without a
single skipped question in any of those responses, despite every question being voluntary to
answer.
“It’s really the tool that facilitates presenting the question in an accessible form,” Evans
said. “It’s hard to get a person to answer, even on an online survey, when it looks like a dog’s
breakfast. It needs to look attractive, and the layout needs to be nice and clean and easily-
understood. And the software itself needs to minimize the download weight, or the whole thing is
just too slow. And certainly we were able to do that very easily using Key Survey.”
ThinkEvans customizes all of their surveys. They’re co-branded with both ThinkEvans’
and the clients’ logos. Making this happen is easy, even without technical skills.
“I’m a maths nerd, not an IT nerd,” said Evans. “But it’s very easy for a non-IT person to
customize a survey with colors and that sort of thing to make it look consistent with that
organization’s look and feel.”
In fact, everything to do with Key Survey has been easy for ThinkEvans. Evans herself
had a very easy and short learning curve. One of her consultants, she said, is an even better
example of how easy Key Survey is to use:
“The person who is the next most involved in designing surveys is a lawyer. And she has
had no trouble. No trouble at all,” said Evans. “I got her logged on the first time and said ‘here’s
what it looks like, follow your nose through the stages of design, let’s take a little practice on just
a little tiny feedback survey.’ And five minutes later, she was tapping away and adding questions
and doing everything… I think if you’re relatively self-sufficient around the office with MS
Office and those sorts of things, it’s not a big step to start developing your own survey.”
Evans also praised Key Survey’s Question Library feature.
“One thing I would say is that the library questions are a very good safety net for people
who are not experienced in designing surveys. So if someone finds they have to start doing
surveys and they’re not actually previously experienced in survey design, the library saves them

3. from the worst mistakes. I have quite substantial expertise in this area and when I looked through
the questions, I thought they were very good basic questions that would stop people from having
to reinvent the wheel if they didn’t have enough experience to get going.”
Support and service are why ThinkEvans began with Key Survey. Evans hasn’t had cause
to use those much lately, but the LiveSupport was invaluable to her when she started out. Sydney
is sixteen hours ahead of the US east coast. This meant that Key Survey’s extended service hours
were a necessity: US business hours are the small hours of the morning in Sydney. Other
companies just couldn’t deliver the necessary quality or availability of service.
“We’d used other tools before, and we were rather less impressed,” said Evans. “And in
particular, we’d had terrible customer service from other organizations. We left another provider
because the customer service was just awful. They didn’t get the eighteen-hours-a-day thing, they
simply didn’t get it. We’ve had that same experience with other software providers. They don’t
get the need for eighteen-hour coverage. They’re also very slow to answer emails or trouble
tickets. Even when I’ve sent email to Key Survey it’s been answered very promptly, which I
think is just critical when you’re working with time differences.”
Key Survey has proven valuable beyond ThinkEvans’ business operations. The
company’s consultants are all involved in community service and volunteer work. They’re
members of groups like Zonta International and Rotary International. These sometimes require
information to be gathered through surveys. ThinkEvans’ consultants have been able to apply
Key Survey to help their non-profits.
“What Key Survey means is that doing the result that we’ve done, we’ve facilitated the
next decision for our clients and often that means another piece of work for us,” Evans said.
“Surveying is a significant part of what we do, but what we really do is around strategic decision-
making. Key Survey enables us to easily and professionally get the information we need to get
that done.”