In this release we’re launching the second phase of Interview. It’s a new way to engage that offers the benefits of collecting detailed ideas in participants’ own words with the safety of curating responses before sharing them with other participants. Interview uses the latest AI technology to gather input from participants on important topics, identify the key ideas being shared, and present those to participants rather than the verbatim thoughts of others.

We’re excited to begin the second phase of limited beta-testing of this feature. If you would like to join the waitlist for the beta program please sign up by clicking here.

Note: This feature is only available for accounts using the Contact Upload feature. To learn more about this feature, click here.

For many engagements, sharing a single participation link far and wide is the key strategy for garnering as much participation as possible; but, sometimes, leaders want a bit more control over who is participating. For those times, we’re pleased to offer unique participation links. 

This feature allows leaders to send individualized links to a list of contacts. When activated, only these links can be used to access a particular engagement. This ensures that participants cannot participate more than once (and will not be counted more than once if they switch devices), and provides a measure of control for leaders regarding who is participating. It also makes it easier for participants to pick up where they left off if participating across multiple sessions. 

These links do not completely prevent participants from sharing access to an engagement with individuals who are not on a predetermined list of participants, but it means that people using the same link can only participate in the engagement once between them.

To activate the unique links feature, navigate to the Participants step of the main creation workflow (shown below) and toggle the Participants option to ON. This will activate the menu where you can select participants based on criteria included in the main contacts list (ex. Department, role, tenure, etc.) or enter contacts manually (these can be copied and pasted from another file).

Participants who meet the criteria or have been manually added to the list will receive an email invitation (which leaders can customize however they like) to participate in the engagement that includes a link that is unique to them. They can unsubscribe from these emails at any time.

Reminder emails for the engagement are sent to the same list of contacts, and invitations can be resent by the leader at any time by selecting the “Invite” option for the engagement.

A common practice when collecting data from participants is to ask for their contact information. This tends to be useful when wanting to give rewards for participating (ex. a prize draw), recruiting volunteers, seeking participants interested in responding to additional questions, or even inviting people to events. In any case, to maintain confidentiality in an engagement, this data should be collected separately from all other responses, otherwise participants may hesitate to provide their information. In this update, we’re pleased to provide a feature that does just that.

The Contact Information feature can be turned on in the Settings menu of any engagement by navigating to the Contact Information section and toggling the “Securely request your participants’ information” option to ON. Leaders can then provide a custom message that participants will see on the Welcome screen for the engagement as well as in the dialogue box where they provide their information. This message will appear alongside standard text informing participants that they will be offered the option to provide contact information, but are not required to do so.

For Exchanges, leaders can also select the number of thoughts they would like participants to rate before this option is presented. For Surveys, the option appears once the survey is completed.

Participants will see this message as part of the Welcome screen:

And will see this dialogue box after they have rated the set number of thoughts or responded to all questions:

The list of contacts is available to leaders in the Reports toll of the Results Dashboard for the engagement and can be exported as a CSV file.

Do you want the red pill or the blue pill, Neo? If you’re asking your survey participants a series of questions with the same response options, I’d strongly suggest going with red. 

Survey fatigue is a real thing, so making things easier on your participants wherever possible is an important best practice. Survey Matrix allows you to display multiple questions to your participants at the same time (provided they are the same question type with the same response options) and lets them respond to each one quickly without any unnecessary clicks or scrolling.

Questions are presented together in a table:

When analyzing results, matrix questions are grouped together in a stacked bar format:

And leaders can take a closer look at each question (and define favorability scores, if applicable) by clicking any of the questions or bars:

One thing to keep in mind when using a questions matrix is that the more rows a matrix contains, the more likely it is that participants will respond to all the questions in the same way. If you’re planning to ask more than five questions in a matrix, consider breaking them into multiple matrices to keep participants engaged and encourage thoughtful responses.

You may have noticed that since our last update we’ve also introduced some improvements to Preview Mode that address feedback we’ve received regarding how to tell Preview Mode apart from the actual active engagement.

The most obvious difference is that we’ve changed the message bar indicating that you are viewing preview mode to be red, so it stands out more. Additionally, we’ve added warning messages that appear as pop-ups when preview mode is opened. If the engagement’s status is draft or scheduled, the warning message simply indicates that responses will not be recorded; if the engagement is active, we’ve added a button that links to the active, data-recording version.