Facebook App: Drupal Survey Engine

Hosted Drupal Survey Engine Runs Facebook App

Get Perception http://getperception.net has partnered with Achieve Internet to create a Drupal-based Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/getperception) that allows small and large businesses to survey their Facebook fans and collect valuable information about how products and services are perceived.
 
Get Perception Managing Partner Alan Edgett describes the application as providing two main services. “It will help companies gain more insight on prospects, customers, and especially, influential Facebook Fans,” Alan says, “ and the technology behind the survey deployment and data storage will provide companies with granular insight into social marketing campaign performance, content strategies, and Fan segments, which will help marketing agencies determine which campaigns are working and which Fans are their influencers.”

Drupal App Project Overview

The application Achieve developed leverages the Drupal content management framework to handle the administration side of the survey campaigns. The Drupal functionality is then embedded in Facebook, where users can fill out surveys without leaving the popular social media site.
 
Drupal serves as the survey engine, allowing non-technical administrators to quickly create and deploy surveys, and it also houses the data after collection. Additional interactive features are available in the application, such as discussion forums and multimedia feedback functionality.  The application leverages Drupal’s core content management and user-management functionality, as well as its flexibility, extensibility, and logical data storage. Best of all, the system provides the administrators with easily reusable surveys – build it once and use it in multiple campaigns.
 

Drupal Facebook Integration

Achieve Internet started with the existing Drupal for Facebook module (http://drupal.org/project/fb), which allows developers to connect a Drupal site to the Facebook API. This module handles authentication and data mapping, so that when Facebook users install the application, they are created as Drupal users. Drupal is able to pull information such as name, location, birth date, and gender, from Facebook.
 
The survey results are stored as Drupal data that can be exported for view and displayed in a variety of formats (e.g., charts, graphs, and spreadsheets) so business analysts can make sense of them.

Embedded Drupal

The surveys themselves are available within Facebook by piping the Drupal site into an iFrame. To do this, Achieve configured the Drupal survey site with a minimal theme and a width appropriate for the frame Facebook designates for applications. For most browsers, this works well, but Internet Explorer does not support iFrames with authentication. Achieve’s team determined that to allow 3^rd party cookies within iFrames on Internet Explorer, Drupal needed to send a P3P header to authenticate the application. After solving this little gotcha, the application was ready to run on all browsers.

Survey Management

Two modules in conjunction enable survey creation and configuration: webform (http://drupal.org/project/webform) and a custom rules engine. Webform allows users to create questions with checkbox, radio button, grid, or textbox answers, and also to make certain questions required, all via a point-and-click interface:


 
All surveys are contained within a campaign, and users find surveys either by travelling directly from the survey creator’s Facebook page, or by clicking on an advertisement. The advertisement URL passes a campaign ID to the rules engine, which determines the appropriate survey page to display to the user. The campaign is then added to the fully configurable “dashboard” the user sees after installing the application.
 
The custom rules engine Achieve Internet developed allows application administrators to configure a campaign’s logic and overall flow by creating intelligent surveys. For example, if users express interest in a certain marketing campaign or are in a certain demographic or psychographic segment, the administrator can configure the survey to show different modules within the application.

Achieve Internet’s Agile Development

Get Perception’s Alan Edgett acknowledges that Achieve’s flexibility played a huge role in making the project work. “Achieve’s ability to take on a flexible development cycle with three week windows enabled us to make a major pivot,” Edgett says. The application was initially narrowly focused on product surveys, and then Get Perception’s clients saw value in using the tool to deeper dive on Facebook Fans. We quickly added increased interactivity within the application—including discussion forums, multimedia interactions, and posts to Facebook Fan newsfeeds. 
 
“Achieve has a very capable and open-minded team,” Edgett says, “that can respond to changes and tweaks.”

Looking Ahead

Get Perception’s marketing experience combined with Achieve’s technology expertise make this a formidable partnership. The first fruit of this partnership is significant, the Facebook Survey application allows Get Perception to offer its clients instant focus group data without having to develop, host, and maintain a new piece of software in house.
 
Moving forward, the flexibility of Drupal enables Achieve and Get Perception to offer clients even more advantages. Drupal data is stored in a secure and logical fashion, and the framework is architected to allow easy communication with 3^rd party tools, including other data sources. Data warehousing and mining, and business intelligence engines can also be integrated into the application to create a powerful set of tools for enhancing the marketing efforts of a wide range of businesses.
 
Using Drupal as the survey engine has the additional advantage of making the application portable. Drupal sits in Facebook via an iFrame, and the application can visit other social networks when desired, bringing the same functionality without having to re-code or re-configure the existing intelligence—another example of Drupal functioning as a highly integration-friendly workhorse.