Who is NextStage?	The NextStage Group of Companies provide advanced behavioural analysis solutions based on research started in 1991 (1987 if you want to nitpick) and development started in 1999. NextStage Evolution is the research division of NextStage based out of Nashua, NH, and Scotsburn, NS, that researches how people interact with digital media and offers training and consulting services based on that research. NextStage Global is the development division of NextStage based out of Scotsburn, NS. NextStage Global provides commercial products and custom software development based on NextStage's proprietary Evolution Technology. Our solutions have been used to address business problems in marketing, education and security.
What does NextStage do?	We provide solutions which help our clients to better understand and act upon online customer behaviour. Our tools and consulting services aid our clients in target audience determination, customization of online content to improve customer experience, persona creation tools for personalized marketing and more. Our consulting team helps clients to structure media and messaging to meet the specific needs of their audience and to better understand who their competition is targeting and how. We partner with our clients (marketing departments, web design teams, marketing consulting teams, etc.) to enhance the capability, functionality and performance of their online and offline business.
Our solutions	We offer our clients Creative unique solutions which can be used to enhance the value and reach of marketing campaigns, Explanations of what consumer behaviors and actions are in-line and out-of-line with their business goals along with tools that explain the “why” of consumer behavior and actions Methodologies and tools for ensuring consistent messaging across all facets (web sites, email, marketing brochures, etc.) of a marketing campaign Expert consulting and training on such topics as branding, effective color usage in web sites, gender differences in marketing and a variety of other areas.
What our solutions can do for you	NextStage's Tools can Analyze digital content and track it against a target demographic profile, essentially gathering some 76,000 opinions in under 30 seconds (in most cases). This capability provides a safe testing ground for new marketing campaign material or new web sites. Demographic profile information is reported by: Gender Age Personae (NextStage Rich Personae and Myers-Briggs equivalents) Target audience appeal and actionability Messaging Unique web site monitoring and analytics providing insight into visitor buying behaviours and intent while providing completely anonymous audience tracking. Visitors browsing experience is never interfered with.
How we do it	Our proprietary Evolution TechnologyTM (ET) determines the key psychological and behavioral characteristics of web visitors. ET uses conventional code to measure how site visitors are interacting with information and passes that information back to our servers where it’s analyzed using our proprietary database. This database was first developed by measuring the behaviors of 3,000 people over five years and correlating those measurements with detailed psychological evaluations of the same subjects. It was later refined with measurements of another 6,000 subjects. The more ET is applied to the real world, the better it is at determining visitor characteristics. At this point in time ET has catalogued some 76,000 unique online behaviors.
Additional Information	More information is available on Case Studies, Marketing Papers, Tools, Trainings and Research.

NextStage Technical FAQs

Q: How is NSE’s (ET) different from other web traffic analysis tools?
A: ET determines why visitors react in various ways when interacting with a website, not just what they do on the website – it captures what’s going on in the visitor mind, not just a record of the visitor’s activity on the website.

Q: Are there privacy or spyware concerns with ET?
A: ET doesn't collect personal information such as name, social security number, credit card numbers, etc. What ET can do is identify individual users and recognize them when they revisit the site later. Or, if it's important for security reasons, ET can identify people who aren't who they're pretending to be and set off alarms. Likewise, ET isn't spyware. Neither ET nor NextStage cares what sites you visit and we don't collect that information. Our concern is making site visitor experiences more rewarding, nothing more.

Q: There's a lot of information in your reports. What am I suppose to do with it?
A: NextStage Global’s Evolution Technology (ET) provides actionable information, not just blind statistics. Clients have used our suggestions to increase visitor loyalty 275%, time on site 350% and conversions as much as 560% in as little as six months time. One client grew their audience from young adults to people 15-65 in three months by changing a handful of words on their page.

Q: How does ET determine what’s going on in the visitor to a website?
A: NSE’s Evolution Technology (ET) is a synthesis of over 120 disciplines from four major fields: Anthropology, Linguistics, Mathematics and Neuroscience. ET creates rich and precise psycho-demographic models of how people interact with information by monitoring and analyzing non-conscious behaviors. These non-conscious behaviors are what allows ET to know what’s going on in the visitor to a website.

Q: You can determine a website visitor’s age without asking them? – how is this done?
A: You can determine a person’s age by studying how they respond to information. A more mature mind (which can be in an immature body) will process information based on all the experience it has at hand. Because of this, that which would confuse a less mature mind won’t confuse a more mature one. By monitoring how the mind interacts with the information we can monitor the maturity – or age – of the mind doing the interacting.

Q: Are your evaluations data intensive? If so, how do you manage this?
A: To date, and on average, we gather 2.5k of data/visitor/page-view. In other words, if a website has 1000 unique visitors a day and each of those visitors navigates 10 pages, we’ll have gathered 2.5k data/visitor page-view x 1000 visitors x 10 pages. This equates to 25M of information from the website for that day. Our system stores the raw data feed for historical and research purposes and also performs calculations on the data. The end result of the calculations is much smaller, usually less than 1k/visitor session, so the final storage requirements are minimal. All calculations and storage are done on our computers. Neither your hosting computers nor your site visitors' computers are affected by this storage or calculations.

Q: How do you implement the NSE system of data capture and monitoring of visitors to our website?
A: We simply load a JavaScript onto your website pages.

Q: Is there performance loss on our website as a consequence of having NSE software loaded?
A: The most we’ve ever experienced is 20 microseconds on a 56k dial-up.

Q: If your server goes down, will it affect ours?
A: No.

Q: Can we test that the software you load onto our live site won’t adversely affect it, before loading it?
A: Yes, by loading it onto some dummy or test site that you have.

Q: What is the research base for Evolution Technology?
A: Almost fifteen years, involving 24 separate tests in the areas of Gender Linguistic Modeling, LexicoStatistical Modeling, Memetic Recognition Modeling, Presentation Format Preference, Sensory to Δt Mapping, Teleology, Time Normalization Studies, Ungoaled Persistence.

Q: What happens if we update our website, do you have to run the analysis again?
A: This depends on how extensive the update is. A complete rebuild of the site would naturally require a new analysis. Changing a sentence here or there doesn't.

Q: Will using Evolution Technology change the relationship I have with my website designer, hosting company or ISP?
A: No, nothing we do affects any existing relationships. Clients have recommend us to their designers, hosting companies and ISPs as possible partners or to become resellers for us.