Ask a question. Get an honest answer.
One question or fifty, answered by anyone you choose. Run it anonymously and nothing stored connects a response to a person, not even for us. That is what makes the answers worth having.
Anonymous or identified, decided before anyone answers
Multi-page surveys with branching, or a single-question poll
Results you can publish, or keep to yourself
What you can build
A poll is one question. A survey is as long as it needs to be, and only asks each person what applies to them.
Real anonymity, not a checkbox
On an anonymous survey nothing is stored linking a response to a person: no account, no name, no email, no IP address, not even the time it was answered. Nobody can read an individual response, including us. It is a property of the schema, not a setting we promise to respect.
Questions that adapt
Twenty-five question types across as many pages as you need, with branching so a person who answers no is never asked the five follow-ups that assume yes. Randomise options to remove order bias.
Results on your terms
Publish live, reveal once someone has answered, hold until it closes, or keep them private. Respondents are told which before they answer, so the rule is a promise rather than a surprise.
Answers from anyone
Accept responses from people without an account when it suits the question, and one person still cannot answer twice. Or invite a specific group and send each person a single-use link.
Small groups protected
Breakdowns that would identify somebody are withheld, including from you. An anonymous survey narrowed to three people is not anonymous, so the tools do not allow it.
Attached to the work
Put a poll in a post, a registration form on an event, or screening questions on a job. Same builder, same rules, wherever the question is being asked.
How it works
01
Choose anonymous or identified
The one decision that shapes everything else, and the one you cannot change once somebody has answered. Anonymous when honesty matters more than follow-up; identified when you need to reply to individuals.
02
Write the questions
Add pages, set which questions depend on earlier answers, and mark what is required. Preview it as a respondent sees it before anyone else does.
03
Decide who answers, and who sees
Open to anyone with the link, or invited only. Pick when results become visible. Both are shown to respondents on the page where they answer.
04
Share it and watch it fill
Every survey gets its own page and a short link. Attach it to a post, put it in the public directory, or send it to a list.
05
Read the totals
Charts and counts, written answers once they have passed an automatic check, and a CSV export on identified surveys.
What we will not do
A survey is only worth running if people believe what it says about their privacy. So it is worth being exact about the limits, including the ones that cost us something.
On an anonymous survey, nobody can read an individual response. Not the person who ran it, not Ardent staff, not our administrators. There is no override, because there is nothing stored to override.
The same fact from the other side: an anonymous response cannot be deleted afterwards, by you or by us, because nothing identifies whose it was. Respondents are told this before they answer.
Exporting an anonymous survey row by row is refused. A spreadsheet of individual responses is the one thing that would undo everything above.
Answering never appears in anyone feed, activity or notifications. Publishing a survey is news; answering one is nobody else business.
No survey answer ever feeds a TrustScore, a ranking, or an advertising profile. There is no money path anywhere in this feature.
Questions, answered
Yes. Nothing is stored that connects a response to you: not your account, not your name, not your email or IP address, and not the time you answered, which is kept only as a date. To stop one person answering twice we store a one-way code in a separate place with no link back to any response. Nobody can join the two, including us.
No, and neither can we, because nothing identifies which response was yours. It is the same fact as the protection, seen from the other side. If you want to be able to change your mind, answer an identified survey instead. You are told which kind you are answering before you start.
Not on an anonymous survey. They see totals, and where a group is small enough that somebody could be picked out by a combination of answers, that breakdown is withheld from them too.
Any account type. Personal and unverified organisation accounts get shorter surveys and a cap on responses. Verified organisations and Foundation accounts get multi-page surveys, branching, file upload questions and batch invitations.
Not if you allow it. One person still cannot answer twice.
Yes, and it is the same engine. A registration form on an event and screening questions on a job posting are surveys attached to those things, built with the same tools and following the same rules.
Ask better questions
The hardest part of asking is getting an answer people actually mean. Start with a poll, or build the survey you have been putting off.