Our system tracks email addresses so people can return to the same Exchange to add more thoughts or change ratings. A participant's identity, thoughts, and ratings are always kept private.

Nobody at your organization can see the thoughts someone added or how many thoughts they rated. We also won’t give anyone’s name or email address away or sell it to anyone—ever.

The best questions are short, simple, and open-ended. Open-ended is particularly important. If someone can respond to your question with a single word, you’ll miss out on the power of nuance and the novel ideas your group can provide.

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?”

Check out one of our customers talking about the value of open-ended questions here.

For more guidance, head to the in-product Exchange Studio, where you'll find great questions on a variety of topics.

Participant responses—we call them thoughts—don’t appear in the same order for everyone.

We select the thoughts to rate at random while ensuring that each thought is seen an equal number of times.

Our platform is built on the philosophy that every voice matters in a conversation. We do our best to ensure everyone’s thoughts get equal visibility, regardless of which are rated highest, shared first, or added most recently.

Yes. We encourage all participants to read and consider every thought shared. That said, some thoughts may not be relevant to a participant or conversation. Participants can skip a thought in the Rate step via the grapes menu (three dots) at the top right corner of the thought.

Yes. We want you to collect honest, useful feedback on important topics, and this requires the trust of both the giver and receiver. For that reason, we encourage you to remove as few thoughts as possible 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:

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

Communication is key to ensuring a successful Exchange. 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. It will give you an overview of the sentiment and themes in a few sentences.

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