How Mote Marine Laboratory Runs Grant-Funded Visitor Research and Student Studies with Formbricks
Learn how Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, a marine research and education nonprofit, utilizes Formbricks to survey every online ticket buyer, keep full ownership of its research data, and launch new guest studies almost every week.
About Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium
Mote is an independent marine research and education nonprofit in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1955. Its 345 staff run research campuses across Florida and the public Mote SEA aquarium.
Formbricks is a professional platform, so the surveys immediately look professional. The conditional logic is way more advanced than what you can do in Google Forms, and that was important to me.
Betsy Kohl, Senior Manager of Guest Experience @ Mote
Use Cases
How Mote Leverages Formbricks
Mote's education and guest experience teams replaced Qualtrics and Google Forms with one platform for visitor, event and research surveys.
Do you live in Sarasota or Manatee County?
This helps us tailor the rest of the survey to your visit.
How often do you visit Mote in a typical year?
Shown only to local visitors.
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Grant-Funded Visitor Research
The Sarasota and Manatee County tourism board funds Mote in exchange for yearly visitor data, and requires the survey to reach every ticket holder. Mote attaches a Formbricks survey to every online ticket and runs it in person too. One qualifier question splits locals and non-locals into completely separate question sets, because each group experiences the aquarium differently.
Research data Mote controls
Surveys
Contact
Mote's copies
Research Data Ownership
Mote's education team runs human-subjects research on student programs, with pre and post surveys from the same person, sometimes over years. After losing years of data on its previous platform, data ownership came first. Full API access and CSV export let Mote keep verified copies on its own schedule, and contacts tie each respondent's surveys together.
Studies launched
Responses per study
Responses over time
Local vs. visiting
How would you rate today's talk?
How did you use the touch tank?
Fast Guest Studies
A dedicated guest research coordinator ran seven to eight distinct studies in his first ten weeks, from visitor experience and exhibit interaction to events and venue rentals. Pilots of about 50 responses show trends in each study's live summary before longer studies begin, and Analysis dashboards bring every study into one view.
- 2→1
Tools Consolidated
- Description
- Mote replaced Qualtrics and Google Forms with one open source survey platform for both teams.
- 7–8
Studies in 10 Weeks
- Description
- One guest researcher launched a new study almost every week after joining.
- 100%
Online Ticket Buyers Reached
- Description
- Every online ticket includes the grant survey, at an aquarium approaching a million visitors a year.
It's much more professional, more put together on the Formbricks side of things. And it's still simple to download the CSV file and make the charts that way.
Daniel Cohen, Guest Relations Research Coordinator @ Mote
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