Keeping your contributions anonymous

At Clever Together, it is our standard practice to anonymise our online workshops. We do this for one simple reason: this is the best way to ensure participants give their honest views about what they think is strong, wrong or missing from your organisation and, as a result, leaders are much better informed about what they need to do differently.

Our promise to you and every other participant is to make this a safe space for you to have your voice heard. This includes any views that might be controversial or uncomfortable. In this platform, you won't feel pressure from anyone to agree with their ideas and you'll be able to share things that your colleagues and managers might not want to hear.

What this means is that any idea, comment or vote that you share in an online workshop will never be shown with your name or identification next to it. What's more we will never share with your organisation any data that includes information they can use to identify you.

With this freedom also comes some responsibility. While we welcome and encourage sharing of views that may be controversial and ideas which could be uncomfortable for some, we expect you to be respectful with your contributions. Accordingly, we have two simple golden rules:

1. We do not allow ideas or comments which are critical of a specific individual. These will either be amended to anonymise the individual, or hidden completely from view.
2. We do not allow any ideas or comments that could reasonably be described as abusive or considered to be bullying, harassment, assault or a threat of violence. Such ideas will be hidden and may also lead to further disciplinary action, depending on their severity.

We ask you to log in with your email address. We do this for 4 reasons:

1. To give you access to the conversation. We need to use your email as a way of verifying your identity and confirming you are authorised to join the conversation..
2. To communicate with you. We use the system to automatically send out reminder emails as well as administrative emails (e.g. to reset your password). We also have a function to email you 'blindly' - this means that we ask the system to send an email to the author of an idea or comment, without knowing who that person is. This is often to invite you to come forward and help to implement the idea you've shared. It would then be up to you to respond (or not) and to either come forward or not. Coming forward in response to one idea will not reveal anything else you've done on the platform.
3. To ensure that all groups within your organisation are represented. We want to be able to say as accurately as possible, that all divisions and staff groups have contributed to the conversation. We also want to be able to analyse if there are issues or challenges in particular divisions or teams. So we might know that an idea came from a nurse in the oncology department, but we won't know it's you (and where a team is smaller than 11 people, we won’t share any breakdown in the analysis to ensure anonymity is protected).
4. To deal with inappropriate contributions. This is the only case in which we might identify you individually - it would only be used as a last resort - if you've ignored repeated warnings or if your contribution is personally abusive or potentially criminal.

If you have any further questions or concerns about anonymisation or your privacy, please check out our privacy policy or drop us a line at privacy@clevertogether.com. We'd be happy to talk.