The more relevant the question, the more likely your teams will participate quickly and take it seriously. Unlike traditional surveys, participants also rate each other’s answers—key to understanding the group’s sentiment and priorities.

The best exchange questions are:

• Short
• Simple
• Open-ended

Open-ended is particularly important. If someone can answer your question with a single word, you’ll miss out on your group’s novel ideas and your discussion’s nuance.

For example, instead of asking, “Do you feel confident with our proposed strategic direction?” you might say, “What are your thoughts or questions about our proposed strategic direction?”

When creating your Exchange, think about how a few survey questions may help you better interpret the data when you dig into your results. For example, would knowing how different departments or regions responded help you better understand your results?

To capture the highest possible participation, run your Exchange live during a meeting or town hall.

Set and communicate your dates and deadlines for Exchanges run outside of live events. Shorter is better. We recommend no longer than 5-7 business days to build urgency.

If you’re launching an Exchange with people new to the process, share the video below or this help center article with them.

We want you to collect honest, helpful insights, and this requires the trust of both the giver and receiver. For that reason, we encourage you to remove as few thoughts as possible while moderating to maintain a respectful conversation. Removing more thoughts than necessary can decrease the range of perspectives available to inform decisions and lead to participants feeling censored.

We have developed best practices for moderating thoughts. The most important thing to remember about moderation is that less is more.

We recommend only removing thoughts that:

• Are rude or hurtful to a person or group of people
• Identify individuals (either by name or by affiliation with a small group)
• Are unintelligible or blank

Set clear expectations on what will not be accepted in the process before people begin sharing their thoughts. That will leave you with fewer thoughts to moderate and much happier participants.

There are several ways to dig into the results of your Exchange. The quickest and simplest is to review the Summary of your Exchange in the Discover Dashboard. It will give you an overview of the sentiment and themes in a few sentences.

From there, you can dive deeper with various analysis features, including Themes to organize thoughts into topic groups and Differences to see where participants agree and disagree.

The best way to get consistent, valuable responses to your Exchange questions is by making sure that you close the loop with participants. Share the results using our reporting features, Reports and Slides, and show how what you learned is informing your next steps each time you ask for input.

If you don’t follow up and share how people’s contributions made an impact, there’s no incentive for your participants to contribute the next time you need their support.

Sharing a summary report of the Exchange within a week following the deadline is a great place to start. Then, get clear on your next steps and communicate them to any impacted teams.