Frequently Asked Questions

The Grupthink platform provides a rich discussion structure that brings valuable ideas, opinions, and consensus to light. Organizations can use Grupthink to create their own branded feedback communities, powered by Grupthink.

Online forums are often filled with rich, valuable insights, yet those insights often get lost in the chaos of online discussion, and it is expensive to aggregate them. Grupthink has the unique ability to bring the most popular insights to the forefront, while allowing rich, free expression.

Surveys are great at capturing quantitative results for a "slice in time", but they are generally one-way conversations and rely on the surveyor knowing all the answers in advance. See more about Grupthink and surveys....

Online "Suggestion boxes" are becoming more common, but they, like surveys, are top-down approaches lacking compelling community engagement and free-form discussion. We believe the richest insights come from listening to members talk to one another, so at Grupthink, everyone is free to start a topic and ask the questions.

With Grupthink, a business or organization can start their own, customized Grupthink-powered community. Grupthink is used for a number of different purposes:

Forums

Grupthink can be used simply to replace or integrate with your existing community forums. You can even integrate the logins so your users don't have to register separately in your Grupthink community.

Online Focus Groups

Grupthink is a fast and affordable alternative to traditional focus groups and offers some compelling advantages:

	Grupthink	Physical Focus Group
Setup	Minutes / Hours	Days / Weeks
Geographic Coverage	Worldwide	Major Metro
Participants	Unlimited	8-12
Duration	Continuous	2 hours, compressed
Cost	A few dollars per project	Thousands for each project

A well-know consumer products company is using Grupthink to gain valuable insights from online communities. Now your company can too.

For Research Agencies...

Grupthink enables research agencies to offer a new qualitative service to their portfolios. If your clients are spending less on research, Grupthink Pro provides an affordable new offering.

For Online Community Managers...

Do you manage a large community? As your community grows, noise and redundancy can crowd out valuable insights and community consensus. Grupthink addresses those problems while providing powerful tools you need to manage your community.

For Product & Marketing Managers...

Grupthink makes it easy to capture feedback to guide new product development or your next marketing campaign.

For Online Publishers...

With a Grupthink-powered discussion area, readers will stay on your site longer and return more frequently. Consider using Grupthink top augment or replace your comment-driven discussion.

For Event Planners...

Grupthink is a great tool for capturing feedback from event attendees, especially for large events that attract participants from around the globe.

 

Like any online community, it will require a small amount of moderation for things like inviting new members, posting news, and simply making sure your community meets your standards of success. To get the most out of a feedback community, an administrator should play an active role in establishing codes of conduct and creating incentives for member participation. Ultimately, the time required to be an effective community manager varies widely depending on community size and number of topics.

Here are a couple insights:

For public, open-registration communities, you will spend some time to uphold and reinforce any community guidelines you define (e.g., preventing spamming and harassment).Typically, even for communities with thousands of members, a single moderator can accomplish these tasks in just a few minutes of participation each week.

You can share the load! Using custom member classes, Grupthink allows you to promote members or colleagues in your community as moderators, to whom you can give specific, elevated permissions (e.g., editing topics and locking users). This not only rewards "regulars", it distributes the responsibilities of managing your community.

Yes, and that's just the beginning. You can create custom classes to distinguish members that have additional permissions you give them.

For example, you could create a class called "Contributor" whose members can edit topics and answers but cannot modify members or see the administrative panel.

Grupthinkvides many options to suit your privacy needs, whether you want a "walled garden" or an open forum. Here are a few options:

Private Community

Unregistered visitors will not be able to get past the login screen, and self-registration is not allowed. As with public communities, you can invite thousands of users at a time via email, or through our single-click, "invite-via-URL" feature.

Public Community

Unregistered visitors and search engines can view your community and all public topics. You can still create private groups and private topics within a public community.

Public Community with Integrated Logins

Allow visitors and search engines to see public discussion in your community, but restrict membership to an existing database. If you have an existing member database, you can allow your customers to skip registration and use their existing logins at your feedback community, while disallowing visitor self-registration. You can create private groups and private topics within a public community.

Private Community with Integrated Logins

Allow visitors and search engines to see public discussion in your community, but restrict membership to an existing database. If you have an existing member database, you can allow your customers to skip registration and use their existing logins at your feedback community, while disallowing visitor self-registration.

You retain ownership of the data created by your community. Grupthink will not share or invite third-party access to your data.

You have many options to kick-off your community:

• Simple Invites: Invite up to 100 people at a time to specific topics in your community.
• Organic or Public Announcement: If you have a public, open registration community, people can register and begin participating on their own. You can promote your community any way you like.
• Advanced Invitation System (select plans only):
  • Mass invitation by e-mail: Use our invitation tool to import a list of email addresses and send personalized invites to each recipient. (Advanced Invitations Only)
  • "Single Click" Invite: Provide a unique link to each invitee which, when clicked, will instantly create the user account and can optionally take them to the Grupthink topic of your choice. (Advanced Invitations Only)
• Integrate Logins with your Existing Community (Select plans only): Members of your existing community can use their existing logins and bypass registration altogether. Our remote authentication option allows you to sync a new Grupthink community with your existing community. Your existing community platform will always be authoritative in this case, and Grupthink will not store user passwords. For more, see {info link}

There are a few important reasons we use our own "instant runoff" system, which allows each person to create their own ranked ballot for each topic.

• The resolution of the voting data is much more rich. For example, you can make other comparisons when viewing reports such as "Among people who voted for apples, lemons were almost always ranked below oranges."
• Ranking an answer just a few places above or below in your ballot can have significant impacts on the overall results, especially in small groups. With simpler voting systems this fidelity can be lost.
• We have some cool features in the works that rely on Grupthink ballots. Stay tuned!

Grupthink is community-powered feedback, where your questions can become conversations. In its most basic form, Grupthink can indeed be used as a survey tool. However, the capabilities of Grupthink go way beyond many limitations of surveys, because it's a social platform. We believe that, although it is important to ask questions, some of the richest information can be found by listening to people talk to one another.

Surveys are great...

• If you have the time to create a polished list of carefully-phrased questions
• If you know, in advance, all or most of the potential answers to questions.
• If you only need to see results for a single moment in time.
• If you have an audience that is receptive to surveys

Grupthink is great...

• If you want to give your members a chance to interact with you and each other regarding their ideas and opinions.
• When you have a questions for which you don't know all the potential answers or don't want to risk biasing the results with your preconceptions.
• If you want a chance to address your members around a particular idea.
• If you don't always have time to build and manage surveys
• If you want to let your respondents rank their answers in order of importance, so you can see even richer results.
• If you want to demonstrate that your organization is open to all questions and ideas

If you are an admin, just go to the Admin section and click "Facebook Settings" under the Account header. Detailed instructions are included there. If you need more help, contact support at grupthink dot com.