Features

Features In-Depth

A topic at feedback.modwest.com

Ranking a ballot is a simple drag 'n drop away.

Travel through time and view topic through past time periods, watching opinions change.

Topics - Once and for All

Topics (questions, polls) are the main conversation pieces in your feedback community, and anybody can add one.

Grupthink topics are different from forum topics or survey questions, because they are designed to last forever! We believe a question should only have to be asked once - it's part of our "once and for all" philosophy.

There are lots of ways to stay on top of your community's topics, including personal activity feeds, RSS, and search. Your home page shows featured, most popular and most active topics, along with a tag cloud to get a quick overview of what your community is talking about.

Voting

Voting in Grupthink is also different from what you've probably seen before: In each topic, members can vote for as many answers as they like. On top of that (and here's the important part) each member can rank those votes in their ballot. This system allows you to measure both overall popularity and "intensity", providing a more colorful picture of what respondents think.

Self Moderation

To promote high quality content, hide unwanted content, and ultimately make your job easier, Grupthink includes a sophisticated self-moderation system. All member submissions can be rated for quality by members of the community. Exceptionally good content is highlighted, while especially poor content (spam, abuse, irrelevant info) is ultimately hidden. Better yet, you control the thresholds that determine these ratings.

We take self moderation a step further by rewarding members who post highly-rated content. Those members will carry more weight when they report content. (Note: This system is separate from answer voting and ranking, and does not affect topic results.)

Viewing Responses & Results

Grupthink provides lots of ways to view topic results and responses, including a host of filters, RSS feeds, search, and even a timeline view.

Time Traveling

Perhaps the most notable topic filter is the timeline. Because topics can live on indefinitely, community consensus in your topics will change to reflect new attitudes. The timeline lets you step back through time and view results as they appeared during different times in history. As a result, the information you track never goes stale - a key benefit over surveys and focus groups.

Many Ways to Participate

Grupthink provides many ways for community members to participate. Those with little time can quickly and easily contribute by voting, ranking their votes, or simply reacting to and rating content provided by others. More engaged members can post topics, answers, and comments. All these activities accrue participation points, which can lead to rewards of your choosing.

Social Features

We've spent the last three years making sure that Grupthink communities are fun, social places to be.

Feedback from the Bottom-Up

We believe that some of the best insights come from unprompted social interaction, as opposed to "top-down" approaches like surveys and suggestion boxes. Grupthink not only facilitates better, more productive discussions, it enables social networking and unique ways for members to interact with one another.

• Friends
• Activity Feed
• Community Blog
• Participation Points
• Reputation System
• Similarity Scoring
• Community-controlled Content Quality
• Email Notifications & Blasts
• Private & Semi-Private Groups

These features give many members another reason to stay engaged so conversations are fresh and ongoing, and results can be monitored over time.

Friends & Networks

Like any good social networking site, Grupthink makes it easy for members to develop connections and interact with one another. Our unique similarity scoring adds a fun twist, allowing members to find people who share similar (or dissimilar!) views. With social networking built in, your feedback community can be a frequent destination for many members.

Reputation System & Rewards

Grupthink automatically awards and tracks points based not only on activity level, but more importantly, the quality of that person's contributions. If you like, you can run contests or reward high-quality community contributors.

Integrate with your existing web presence

Style management tools.

Custom Design & Domain

Grupthink makes it easy to fully customize your feedback community to match your site's branding. Grupthink offers easy tools for colors, fonts and images, plus the option to tweak the site CSS to your liking.

Plus, you can choose a custom domain or subdomain for your community, such as "feedback.yourdomain.com".

Single Sign-on: Use Existing Logins

If your community members already have log-in accounts for your organization, you have the option to let them sign in to Grupthink using those account credentials. (available as an upgrade and on select plans).

Privacy

Your feedback community can be either open to the public or private (i.e. invitation only). Even in a public community you have the option to create private groups, so you can have more focused or private conversations.

Community Management

It's a breeze to find and manage members in your community.

Managing Members

Large communities require a rich set of administrative tools to keep a community running smoothly and engage members. For example, you can send mass announcements, invite new members, and lock users, manage participation points, and create special member classes.

Managing Content

As an administrator, you control all submitted content. Plus, you can add news, custom pages, page add-ins (for serving your own ads or widgets), change site categories, and even customize the default notification emails.

Serve your own ads

Attracting a lot of traffic? Use Page Add-ins to serve your own ads and earn revenue!. You can also use Page Add-ins to post any other custom content of your choice.

Research

Already have a member list? Adding members with full profiles to your community is easy. Plus, you can append custom fields to member profiles, such as unique ID's and custom demographics.

Advanced Recruitment

Grupthink features an optional invitation system that consolidates the respondent's set-up process with a single click of a URL:

• Automatically creates a respondent account.
• Signs the respondent into the system.
• Serves a pre-determined topic page to the respondent's browser.
• Reports status to the administrator's invitation console.
• Sends the respondent an email with new account information for future use.

There are a number of ways to bring members into your community, including a convenient invitation link. This "single-click" invitation system increased participation rates from 65% to 98% for one of our clients, who was conducting online focus groups with nearly 1,000 members in each panel.

Custom Member Attributes

In order to track community consensus by segments that are meaningful to you, Grupthink lets you add and populate custom fields to respondents' profiles. For example, you can attach additional demographic info or unique ID's to each member profile, and use that data in your reporting.

Reporting

As administrator, you'll have access to exclusive member reports. In addition, Grupthink provides the option to export detailed Voting and Comment reports in spreadsheet format. The system generates CSV documents that can be opened and manipulated in Microsoft Excel and other data analysis tools.

With the analytics option, you can add site analytics code of your choosing and monitor your traffic to see who is coming, how they got there, and watch other visitor trends.