Ann Ray
Your on-call survey expert

Query Group, Inc.

Websites:

• http://www.querygroup.com

I help people conduct better surveys.

Sometimes that's as an outsource for: Start-to-finish projects Web survey programming Database restructuring Report generation

And sometimes it's as a coach, helping people via phone/Webex sessions, workshops, and videos/workbooks to: Avoid common pitfalls Increase response rates Write clearer questions Understand statistics and business risks * Get more out of their software and work more efficiently

I'm a pragmatist and a teacher as much as anything else, which is why I've built a practice that is very different from most survey consulting companies. Most traditional firms refer to themselves as "full service," which could also be thought of as 10 course prix fixe. My services are more like tapas, with clients picking and choosing which bits of their project they wish to outsource or keep in house, or even a brand new client able to get help in as little as one hour's coaching.

So what could be accomplished in just an hour? The most common service is a survey review, which is usually handled as ~40-45 minutes of my off-line evaluation, and then a call to go over my findings. But it could also be a similar review of reports. Or a strategy session on how to best tackle a new project in terms of Web/paper/phone, incentives, length, timelines, lists, survey structure, etc. Or a software coaching where we share a computer screen, getting you past a bump in your learning curve as we're working to finish the file you have to deliver to a client tomorrow.

MBA, University of Washington

MS Commerce in Marketing, Santa Clara University

Two years going the wrong direction with MechE at MIT

18 years in surveys, coming from the tools and services side of the industry rather than a market research agency. This has given me an unusual breadth of experience: Customers from the research elite such as HayGroup and StatsCanada, to self-taught researchers, to many who had never conducted a survey User technical skills from "How do I find a Desktop folder?" to 3 sections ahead of the class Survey gamut for market research, customers, polling, employees, members, students, events, training, audits, ... Media including paper, Web, kiosks, phone Budgets from "Urk, can we cut the shoestring in half?" to "Whatever, as long as it's done the way they want" Timelines from "Whenever" to "My client's calling me at midnight" * Visibility of my participation from equal partner to ghost

And from my 15 years at Apian Software--latest role VP Operations--before starting Query Group, I also picked up: Training essentials, because contrary to what textbooks think is important, you don't care how a statistic is calculated, just how to use it IT speak, because sometimes it does help for a conversation to short-hand to acronyms--or you may need an interpreter