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Confidentiality

I wanted people to be able to say what they actually think.

Somewhere in the middle of a survey, someone stops and wonders who is going to read this. That pause is the moment an assessment either earns the truth or settles for the polite version.

Why I wrote this page

I have sat on community nonprofit boards, and I know how carefully people weigh what they are about to write down, particularly when the question is about how well the organization is actually run.

So we tried to put the promise into the system rather than into a paragraph. I have tried to describe it all here in plain terms, including the places where it stops. It seemed to me this is the page I would want to read before answering somebody else's survey.

Watch: how your answers are protectedWhere our protection stops
About thirty seconds, captions on.

The three numbers that do most of the work

Each of these is a line in the code rather than a habit, so it holds on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody is thinking about it.

3
before a group gets its own average.
5
before disagreement is mentioned.
10
before a comparison group appears.

How many answered

What the report can say depends on how many people answered

  1. 0 to 2 peopleNo report at all
  2. 3 or 4Organization-wide scores, and it stops there
  3. 5 or moreThe gap appears, without a direction

Every answer counts toward your organization's score, whatever the size of the group it came from.

Read these rules in full

Below 3 people in total, there is no report

If fewer than 3 people have completed the survey, KindTru declines to build a report at all, and tells you so rather than handing you a document. I would rather say that plainly than give you something drawn from two answers, which would carry the look of a finding without being one. A closed survey can be reopened for 7 days, so the remedy is usually to invite a few more people and wait a little longer.

A group of fewer than 3 does not count as a group

Every answer counts toward your organization's score, whatever the size of the group it came from, because a number that belongs to everyone points at nobody. What a small group does not get is an average of its own. If fewer than 3 people from a group (your board, your senior staff, or your program staff) complete the survey, that group's average is never kept: it is dropped before anything is saved, no page, file or report shows it, and your report cannot compare that group with another one. With one or two people in a group, a group average is a personal one.

A small response set gives you the picture and not the comparison

When no group has reached 3, the report is still written from everyone who answered, and what it leaves out is the comparison between one group and another. It seems to me that is the right trade, since the comparison is the part that could be walked back to a person and the overall picture is not. If you want the comparison, the remedy is to bring two groups up to 3 people each (and 5 people in all) rather than to lower the line.

Between 3 and 4, the report stays general

With 3 or 4 respondents in total, the report gives organization-wide scores and stops there. It will not tell you that opinions differ, because in a group that small, naming a disagreement comes very close to naming a person.

At 5 or more, the gap appears without a direction

Once 5 or more people have responded in total, the report may note that people in different roles see a topic differently. Then it stops. It does not say which group scored it higher, and no screen in the report puts a number beside a group's name. In my experience the places where people in different roles see things differently are the most useful pages in the whole report, and they stay useful without a direction attached.

From the moment you press submit

What happens to the answer you give

In order, from the moment you press submit to the moment somebody reads the report.

  1. Step 1: You answerThere is no page in KindTru that displays one person's assessment answers, including the pages only we can reach.
  2. Step 2: Combined with everyone'sScoring works from everyone's answers taken together, and the report is written from those combined results.
  3. Step 3: The minimums3 before a group has its own average. 3 in total before any report. 5 in total before a difference is mentioned.
  4. Step 4: Two screensChecked before a report is accepted, and again at the moment anything is read.
  5. Step 5: The reportWritten from those combined results.

These screens catch the phrasings we have seen. I would not call them exhaustive, and the minimums above them are where the protection really sits.

Each step, in full

No screen shows your survey answers on their own

There is no page in KindTru that displays one person's assessment answers, including the pages only we can reach. Scoring works from everyone's answers taken together, and the report is written from those combined results. This is the same design that keeps your answers private from your own executive director, which I think is the part that matters most.

Two screens over the written findings

The written sections are drafted with AI assistance, and I did not want to rely on good behaviour. More than a dozen patterns are checked before a report is accepted, so anything resembling “the board rated this lower” is written again or taken out, and the report may wait for a person to read it. A second set of more than a dozen runs again at the moment anything is read: on the report page, on the Facilitation Kit and Strategic Planning Kit pages, on the PDF and Word files built from any of them, and inside the emails that carry findings out to other people. Everything passes through one shared screening step, rather than through a list of places somebody remembered to add it, because a list is what fell out of date the first time. These screens catch the phrasings we have seen. I would not call them exhaustive, and the minimums above them are where the protection really sits.

For funders

If your funder gathers a cohort

A funder never sees an individual organization's scores and never learns which categories any organization chose to share. And you can withdraw whenever you like, at which point your data leaves the aggregation.

The cohort rules, in full

A funder can use KindTru to see how a group of the organizations it funds is doing as a whole. That arrangement makes people nervous, reasonably, so it carries its own minimums, and they are stricter than the ones above.

A category needs at least 5 organizations to have opted in before any statistic for it is shown, and nothing in KindTru lets anyone set that number below 5, including us. Comparison groups within a cohort (by budget, mission, region or organizational age) show a category only when at least 10 organizations in that group have shared it. A funder can raise that number, but nothing in KindTru lets anyone set it lower, because a smaller group is easier to recognize than the whole cohort it came from. Below either line a funder sees a locked placeholder rather than a partial signal.

5
organizations opted in before any statistic for a category is shownNobody can set it lower, including us.
10
for a comparison group, by budget, mission, region or ageCounted in organizations that shared the category. A funder can raise it, never lower it. Below either line, a locked placeholder.

The honest part

Where our protection stops

I would rather tell you the limits than let you find them.

Your answers stay linked to your invitation, which is also how they can be removed

How removal works

Your answers are saved as you go, tied to your invitation, which is how you can stop and come back (and why I would ask you not to forward your private link, since until you submit it opens what you have saved). That same link is how we can take your answers out again. If you have been invited and have not submitted, your administrator can remove your invitation while the survey is still open, and whatever you had saved goes with it. If you have already submitted, write to us at hello@kindtru.org before the report is built and I will remove your answers by hand. Once the report is built, your answers are already inside its combined numbers and the report will not change, though we can still delete your own answers, your name and your email address from our records. I should be plain about what this means. No page in KindTru shows one person's answers, but they do sit in our database beside your invitation, and as the person who runs that database I could look them up there. I do not, and the only thing I will do with one person's answers is delete them when that person asks. I would rather say all of this before you answer than discover it with you afterward.

Your administrator can see who answered, but not what they said

Read in full

Whoever is running the survey sees which invitations are still outstanding and how many people from each group have finished, which is how they know when to close it. What they cannot see is any individual's answers. I mention it because in a small organization, knowing who answered is itself a piece of information, and you should know that much before you decide how candid to be.

In a very small organization, arithmetic is arithmetic

Read in full

If four people answer and everyone knows which four were asked, a determined reader can narrow things down. The minimums above exist to make that harder, and I want to be straight with you that they cannot make it impossible.

We can protect the data, but not the conversation

Read in full

If somebody asks around the office what people said, no system of ours reaches that room. The way to handle it is the ordinary human one, which is to agree beforehand that the answers stay in the report. It works better when the agreement is made out loud, before the survey goes out.

One more thing, and then the fine print

My hope is that this page turns out to be boring, and that nothing on it surprises anyone who reads it after they have already answered. If something here is unclear, or if you are weighing whether to answer somebody's survey honestly and this page did not settle it, I would like to hear about it. What would you need to know before you told the truth on a survey like this one?

hello@kindtru.org

The full legal version, including how long we keep things, lives in our Privacy Policy (including the section on how findings are drafted). This page is the plain-language companion to it, and where the two ever seem to disagree, please write to us and we will fix it.