Involve.me is a relative newcomer to the quiz maker space – their team has already shifted directions a few times in their brief history. Originally known as Brandquiz – their initial pitch was delivering customizable quizzes and audience engagement for agencies and brands, hence the name. They rebranded in April, 2019 to Involve.me.
Like their home page says, Involve.me has placed a big emphasis on audience engagement. They have a relatively broad set of eight content types – including a quiz, personality test, survey, and payment form.
Involve.me has calculators (a bit like Outgrow) and a unique payment form as well some standard formats – they offer a good selection of options.
Involve.me is a flexible, if pricey, quiz maker – suitable for intermediate and advanced marketers. We like the ‘block’ builder user interface – which gives a lot of options to you as the creator when creating your quiz.
However, as a user, their desire for flexibility adds a unnecessary level of complexity and extra effort when creating your quiz. We found ourselves searching for the various options in the project settings, then the account settings, before checking out the individual question level settings.
Brace yourself for a longer lead time and adoption process for your marketing team.
They’re a solid quiz creator with lead generation and 12 native data integrations.
Collecting text, emails, and the like are fine but Involve.me lacks some of the additional options we like to see in terms of fields.
- For example, you can’t add drop-downs, radio buttons, time/date picker, and other choices.
- These are highly useful for helping segment and qualify leads as potential customers.
For an EU-based company, we were surprised to discover Involve.me is only partially-compliant with the GDPR. Their data processing agreement (DPA) is very weak particular. We’ll cover this in great detail later – but the main thing, using Involve.me could leave you open for fines up to 4% of annual revenue, or 10 million euros (whichever is larger).
Ouch.
We’ll cover this in more detail below – but be cautious if you decide to use their service; the legal liability is with you, not the software vendor you select.
Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Involve.me:
- Range of quiz formats: ★★★★☆
- Customization options: ★★★☆☆
- Lead generation: ★★★☆☆
- Data privacy: ★★☆☆☆
- Pricing: ★★★☆☆
- Overall: ★★★☆☆
Involve.me quiz types – reviewed
That’s enough of an intro overview review. Let’s take a deeper look at each of Involve.me’s eight content formats:
Quiz
Like any good quiz maker, Involve.me has a quiz unit – so you can ask your audience questions with right/wrong answers. There is no limit to the number of questions or answers in a quiz – and you can add images, videos, or text.
And we were impressed at the granularity of control in Involve.me’s quiz maker – you can set different points values by question AND answers.
One use case we’ve seen occurs when quiz creators want to reward people even if they guessed incorrectly. You could give partial credit for good – if wrong – answers.
Personality test
Involve.me recently made a splash with their version of a personality test – called ‘Answer-based outcome assessments’. To be honest, after reading their blog post and trying their product, we’re still not really sure what they mean.
But let’s dive in.
We ‘think’ they’re just describing a personality test – where you assign a result, based on the user’s overall responses. Super effective with marketing, personality tests are also some of the most viral content around.
As we mentioned above, we like Involve.me’s block system – it makes it easy to quickly add questions and possible results.
They also have a fairly clear personality mapping set up – you assign points based on each response. For example, in this example, people who answer ‘I really dislike my day job and would like to be my own boss!’ would get 1 point for ‘You’re not there yet.’
After quiz takers answer your questions, they’ll see this personality result screen. Involve.me adds nice call to action buttons – you can send people to different URLs based on their quiz results.
We’re big fans of this feature – it’s a natural way to suggest additional content or recommended products for each user.
Involve.me does a pretty good job of outlining scores to each result – we’d put them up there with Outgrow and Interact for ‘middle of the pack’ personality test tools. Overall, we still prefer how Riddle tackles this – balancing flexibility and intuitiveness.
Survey
Involve.me’s survey tool is a basic survey tool – designed for collecting feedback and information from an audience. Compared to some other quiz maker tools, Involve.me does not offer a wide range of features – but is good for basic uses cases.
In terms of question types, Involve.me has a good selection of question types – including single, multiple choice, and free text.
We were a little disappointed by the lack of attention spent on this content type by the Involve.me team. You can tell they essentially just copied their quiz module – because (confusingly) they left the ‘correct answer’ option in all the questions.
Surveys are all about feedback – there isn’t ever a ‘right’ answer for someone’s opinion. They should remove this.
One other weakness of the platform is a lack of media search tools. With so many high quality image, icon, GIF, and other tools out there, Involve.me requires you to upload any images or icons for your survey. That’s time-consuming – and distracting.
To be fair, you can use their existing templates – which has button, picture, or number icons included. But that’s only at the template level – you can’t start from scratch and access these images.
It’s time-consuming to have to manually add things for each questions. There should be pre-built styles – ie. 5 stars, thumbs up/down – that the user could quickly select and apply.
Involve.me – GDPR and privacy review
Involve.me is an Austrian company. Being based in the EU, they have taken some decent steps towards being compliant with these and other global data privacy regulations.
TL;DR? Involve.me is a partially GDPR-compliant quiz maker. Here are the key areas of concern:
- Do not use their implementation of FB pixels to track your audience.
- Update: they now have a data processing agreement available here. However, this is just a webpage with no instructions on how to get them to sign it for you.
- Involve.me uses US-based cloud software companies – the now-cancelled EU-US Privacy Shield means that’s not legal.
Trackers:
Good news. We didn’t see any trackers from involve.me of any kind embedded in our sample quiz – so both your data and your quiz takers’ personal information will be safe.
DPA agreement:
One of the GDPR’s more fun requirements – you need to sign a data processing agreement (DPA) with Involve.me as they will hold your customers data on your behalf.
- The good news? They provide a DPA on this website: https://www.involve.me/data-processing/
- The bad news (part 1)? The DPA has no signature fields and no instructions on how to actually execute the agreement with involve.me. We guess you would need to reach out to their customer service to get a version of this DPA to sign.
- The bad news (part 2)? The DPA specifies the user data is stored by American companies:
Data is stored by involve.me in data centers located in Frankfurt, Germany managed by its subcontractor Amazon Web Services
410 Terry Avenue North
Seattle, WA 98109-5210
As outlined below, after the cancellation of the Privacy Shield Agreement, storing data with U.S. providers is not GDPR-compliant, no matter where the physical servers are located.
In addition to using the Amazon Cloud, they also use Intercom.io for analytics.
Intercom stores all data in the U.S. and collects quite a bit of personal identifiable information. The DPA states that Intercom Inc. complies with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework, which obviously is obsolete by now.
Amazon cloud servers:
Involve.me runs their quiz maker using the Amazon Cloud infrastructure, using AWS Servers in the EU. This might be the biggest wrinkle in their setup as the AWS EU infrastructure is not GDPR-compliant anymore after the Privacy Shield Agreement between the U.S. and Europe has been cancelled in July 2020.
Facebook pixel – no consent:
We did find another really, really big red flag for the GDPR.
When you add your Facebook Pixel ID to your quiz, the pixel fires immediately, without getting the user’s consent. Unfortunately, there is no way to ask for consent when setting up the pixel tracking in your quiz.
Facebook pixels are crucial if you are serious about quiz marketing. It lets you do all sorts of things including build a custom audience of like-minded leads on Facebook.
Unfortunately, if you want to stick to the GDPR rules of consent, involve.me makes this impossible. We hope they fix this ASAP.
Involve.me – platform features
Okay – so let’s go into greater detail about Involve.me’s quiz maker and their tools, from the quiz creator’s perspective.
Read on – we’ll tackle each of these sections one by one:
- User interface and ease of use
- Styling
- Media options
- Data connections
- Sharing
- Publishing
- Statistics
- Pricing
User interface and ease of use
As we mentioned above – Involve.me has put a priority in having a highly flexible quiz maker, with lots (and lots!) of features.
That’s the good news.
The bad? There’s an extra level of complexity for even simple operations. Plus, Involve.me doesn’t support a draft quiz’ option – where you can edit a live quiz and push change live when you’re ready.
Instead, once you publish your quiz, any changes or edit instantly go live.
That’s a seriously bad idea – the best quizzes are constantly edited and optimized post-launch.
But Involve.me doesn’t give you the chance to preview and check things out – all your edits are pushed immediately live. Ouch.
Right – their quiz maker interface is also pretty confusing.
We like how they give you a wide range of content blocks to choose from – and each overall card is blank slate. You have a lot of freedom to mix and match quiz questions, images, and lead generation elements.
However, it took us awhile to figure out the difference between the ‘design’ and ‘content elements’ sections – and then the semi-hidden ‘General project design’ (with the red arrow).
With involve.me, you can be pretty sure they’ll have the option you need in their quiz maker – it’s just going to take awhile to find it.
Involve.me – styling
Involve.me is a pretty slick quiz maker – with a nice professional look and feel.
As a quiz creator, you’re given a wide range of templates and style templates to choose from – a great starting point for new users.
We were also big fans of Involve.me’s layout options – from transparency to text colors and uploading your own custom fonts, they’ve got you covered.
You can tell them come from an agency background; you have a great deal of flexibility in making your quiz match your site’s branding and as well as look and feel.
Check out their additional design options – adding custom fonts and changing sizes for different elements like titles, questions, and answers was a nice touch.
Involve.me also features page or project level designs – you can create and save a particular quiz’s look and feel for easy re-use. This is useful for agencies – who need to quickly roll out brand-compliant content for different (and picky) clients.
Media options
Quizzes and other interactive content might sound simple – just ask questions, right?
But we’ve found it’s critical to make them a multi-media experience adding videos, audio, GIFs, and more to catch and hold the attention of today’s audience. People have ever-shorter attention spans and boring quizzes won’t be finished and shared – plus you won’t get a chance to capture their details in a lead generation form.
Images – basic options only
Considering how flexible their block-based quiz creator was, we were surprised to find that Involve.me only support basic manual image uploads. That’s the bare minimum – most quiz makers (like Riddle or Try Interact) make it easier for creators with image libraries like Unsplash or Pexels.
They also offer some in-tool basic image editing options – like a zoom in/out and some shapes. We would have liked to see a basic ‘crop and reposition’ tool though – to spare the need to use Photoshop or the like.
Video clips with Involve.me
Involve.me does better than most quiz makers in how they handle video clips – they support some of the most popular video hosting services out there, including Vimeo, Wistia, and YouTube. That’s pretty awesome.
However, they don’t support a simple MP4 video upload option – you will need to use a hosting service. Plus Involve.me doesn’t offer any sort of custom start/end points – so you can only embed the whole clip.
It’s surprising actually – that means if you want to show a short 10-15 second clip of a 5 minute video, you’ll have to edit, save, then upload that particular clip.
From our reviews, only Riddle offers this sort of flexibility – great for use cases like “What happens next?” You could show from :07 to :17 of video clip A, ask a question – then show :18 to :27 as the answer.
Data connections
Collecting leads with online quizzes is just the start. It’s also equally important that you can send leads to your marketing software (like MailChimp, HubSpot, and Salesforce), so you can automatically send personalised follow up messages around each user’s quiz responses.
Survey Monkey and Typeform are awesome at this – but Involve.me does pretty well too, offering 12 native integrations including ActiveCampaign and Zoho.
We’re also big fans of Involve.me allowing you to collect money from your quizzes with PayPal and Stripe – ideal if you’re a teacher or consultant. You could also charge for contest entries, downloading quiz reports and the like.
Involve.me – social sharing
When you create a quiz, you’re making inherently social content. Online quizzes and personality tests are some of the most viral content around.
Most quiz maker software include integrated social sharing across social networks – let’s see how Involve.me stacks up.
Involve.me supports:
That’s about average – although we’ve seen other quiz maker tools support WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and even the Russian social network VKontakte.
Social sharing messages is pretty basic on Involve.me – you can add a social block to your results, but you can’t modify or change the template messages.
Your quiz takers can only share their results – using a “I got: <quiz result>” template.
That’s pretty limiting – you can’t change the text to match your tone of voice, add hashtags, or modify by different social networks.
If this is a pain point for you, Riddle does a great job of this – you can customize the messages for each platform, use variables, and more.
Publish
To paraphrase Dickens, using Involve.me’s publish step is ‘the best of times and the worst of times’.
A big pain point? They don’t use a WordPress-style ‘draft’ system – so once you publish a quiz, any future edits you make are instantly live.
There is no publish process or review capability, making it very dangerous to edit projects after they have gone live.
The best quizzes will constantly evolve as you see what questions resonate with your audience. This means you’ll be at high risk of publishing by mistake as you make edits.
We would much prefer edits go to an unpublished draft – then you could push the new version live when you were ready.
On the positive side, Involve.me has a robust set of publishing options – their responsive embed codes work on most platforms including Wix and Weebly, plus they have a QR code which is good for offline events like conferences.
Involve.me – statistics and analytics
Creating the quiz is just half the process – any good quiz maker will include a statistics module to provide deep insights into what’s working, and what’s not.
Involve.me has a fairly standard statistics module – with two views:
- Account-wide
- Per quiz statistics
Their account view is a high level snapshot of how many people saw, started, completed, and shared your quizzes.
Involve.me provides a more granular analytics module for each quiz you make, showing a breakdown by:
- Individual questions
- Quiz results
- Audience
- Overall results
- Device type
- Country
We were impressed – but also worried – about their per-quiz taker view. You can click on individual quiz takers who fill in the lead form – and see their individual quiz responses.
Useful? Definitely.
But it also seems very risky from a GDPR and data privacy perspective – since this requires Involve.me to hold personal data for every quiz taker.
To keep their data protection lawyers happy, any marketers need a quiz maker who don’t store any data at all (Riddle is our current pick for data privacy).
Use with caution – or run by your legal folks.
No date range options
Involve.me’s analytics are ‘all or nothing’ – you can’t customize or compare different date ranges. This is important because optimizing quizzes requires you to see and measure the impact of a change (for example, seeing if a change in questions 4 and 5 improved quiz completion rates-.
Pricing
First the positive, we really like how Involve.me is one of the few quiz creator tools who offer a pretty nice free plan.
Sure, it’s capped at 100 submissions a month, and missing some key features – but it’s still useful for basic use cases by people who don’t want to pay.
Involve.me’s pricing is on the higher end for quiz maker tools – and we really don’t like how they cap even their high-end business account. As a business owner, if we were paying $200 a month, we’d expect unlimited usage.
Involve.me also has a nasty policy of locking accounts that run over these caps.
This could be a problem – many times you can’t predict which content will go viral. If you create a good campaign, and get more than your monthly plan’s limit, you could be forced to pay to upgrade to keep it going.
And one last grumble – we review quiz maker and other software tools for a living. We really hate when a company forces you to sign up with your credit card, just to see if you like the features they’re offering.
That seems so short-sighted – you should make it as easy as possible for people to test your software, so they become long-term happy customers.
(Want credit card-free trials? Try Outgrow and Riddle. Or you could give Buzzfeed a shot – if you can get by with a completely free, but very limited, quiz creator.)
Involve.me is the same way – you need to give your payment information in order to test out any paid plan. If you don’t cancel within 14 days, you’re automatically charged.
Involve.me customer support
Involve.me is another quiz builder that limits support by the type of plan you offer.
It’s understandable that free plans might have slower customer support – but even the starter plan is limited. We also noticed that Involve.me doesn’t actually spell out what the difference was between Limited <> Basic <> Priority.
But here’s what we saw when we checked support. Ouch – that’s pretty slow, especially if you have an urgent issue or client deadline.
Summary
Involve.me is a flexible, highly capable quiz maker – with a good range of formats and extensive customization options, especially with their higher plans.
- We recommend them for agencies or other folks who need polished, capable quiz lead generation.
- Content-wise, we like the modular block system they developed – and their quiz templates look good on all devices.
- However, Involve.me has limited multimedia options – manually uploaded images and hosted video only, so it’s best for folks with good assets of their own. If you’re looking to easily search and add your own images or videos, or use a wider range of GIFs, audio clips, and the like – then we recommend you keep looking.
One last note – although Involve.me is European, they are not GDPR-compliant. We pointed out some serious concerns over data privacy – under this data regulation, you’re liable for any software tools you use. Choosing Involve.me might increase your legal exposure.
Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Involve.me
- Range of quiz formats: ★★★★☆
- Customization options: ★★★☆☆
- Lead generation: ★★★☆☆
- Data privacy: ★★☆☆☆
- Pricing: ★★★☆☆
- Overall: ★★★☆☆