Patent ID: 7922090

Claim:
A method for gathering information comprising: securing a prospect list comprising subjects to be surveyed using Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to target an audience for a sample; creating and printing a questionnaire comprising questions specific to said subjects on said prospect list; designing and printing a questionnaire check comprising an area to insert answers to said questions from said questionnaire; placing said questionnaire and said questionnaire check into an envelope for mailing; developing an interrogatory scheme and alert triggers based on a condition or pattern of responses provided on the questionnaire; developing an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) template from a sample questionnaire check for automatic data capture and creating a database with said OCR template; designing reports for summarizing or categorizing said data captured from said questionnaire checks and using said reports to report said data gathered from said questionnaire checks; recording cancelled questionnaire checks by scanning said checks as viewable images, and scanning the questionnaire checks using said OCR templates from data capture; verifying said data captured from said questionnaire check and storing said data into a database; reporting said data using said reports designed for summarizing or categorizing data.