As The World Reopens: Here’s How The Research Team At Momentive Helps You Forge The Future

By Jon Cohen, Chief Research Officer, Momentive

To understand how people are reassessing their lives and choices in the wake of the global pandemic, we have to ask questions—it’s the only way to understand the crucial trends shaping the future of every industry. As a premier question-asking platform for the last 20+ years we’re perfectly positioned to help in this unprecedented moment, but we also took a hard look at how well decision-makers recognize how much our software has advanced. The result is a major rebrand under a new look and feel. SurveyMonkey is now Momentive, a new kind of agile experience management company.

This change comes at a point when some of us are lucky enough to begin emerging from the ongoing devastation of the pandemic. While there’s still more progress to make, many parts of the world are looking brighter. In fact, a large majority of Americans, 71% of respondents in one of our recent polls, are already comfortable dining at restaurants, and many are eager for a return to normalcy.

As we reach the other side of this pandemic, here’s how the research team at Momentive helps decision-makers shape what’s next.

We produce research on key societal issues

Business leaders, politicians, and journalists alike all rely on data to make decisions. What will the return to the office look like? What support do small businesses need to stay afloat? What topics do readers care most about? These questions drive our team. To answer them, we tap into our rich, unparalleled network of respondents—the more than 2 million people who answer questions on our platform every day. (Learn more about how we get our data.)

Last February, we began tracking how everyone felt about the COVID lightning bolt that hit us all. Slowly but surely, we’ve seen a change: we’re growing more comfortable reclaiming old freedoms. Our most recent public opinion data shows that

• 71% of respondents would be comfortable dining-in at a restaurant (up 28 points from July 2020)
• 60% of respondents would be comfortable traveling by plane (up 33 points)
• 51% of respondents would be comfortable going to a bar in-person (up 25 points)
• 46% of respondents would be comfortable gathering in a big crowd at a concert, sports venue, or public gathering (up 26 points)

Why bother collecting all these data? It’s so people can understand the opinions of their stakeholders to make better informed decisions.

We empower decision-makers with insights

It was a banner year for data. We ran U.S. election polls, we tracked challenges of black small businesses with Operation Hope, and we highlighted the ongoing hate crimes against the AAPI community. People around the world use Momentive to give feedback on anything you can imagine. When you pair robust insights with other tools through integrations, the possibilities for our customers are endless. 

Our forthcoming Zoom integration will enable organizations to capture the same kinds of feedback that we capture on public opinion, but for employees—Was this meeting worth your time? Do you wish it was in person? Surveys remain the chief means of gauging the feelings that will drive the decisions that shape our months and years ahead. 

Think of what you can do by mapping how people feel about returning to offices. As people leaders grapple with safety protocols for re-entry, more flexible working policies, and local requirements, there is a need for on-tap data. Using our market insights solution and visualization software like Tableau, people can visualize sentiment data to extract more insights from it. By capturing how people are thinking about their choices, decision-makers are left with the right information to chart the future path. 

We represent a diversity of voices at scale

Our agile platform is continually improving, based on lessons learned from powering surveys from millions of users asking billions of questions. Through the millions of survey questions we field each day, we help people connect with those that matter the most to them—whether they’re doctors under 30, construction workers in Maine or Asian American retirees. We continually assess question types and answer sets to be more inclusive, such as recommending nonbinary gender options. We also created one of the most inclusive panels available and trained our machine learning algorithms on this diverse data set that included more than 6 billion respondents.

I’m reminded of the clever ad from Extra Gum when I say that we’re all embarking on a new journey that in many cases doesn’t resemble where we thought we’d be 15 months back. The past year taught us that it’s time to make bold changes to make smart moves for the future. We’re eager to help you do that. We’re eager to help you shape what’s next. Learn more at Momentive.ai.