Show HN: Anonymous Feedback Tool for Teams

Hey there!

Signals is a survey system that collects feedback from staff (mostly) but also clients and stakeholders in a business. It does this via SMS on a weekly schedule (the cadence can be changed but it works best when done weekly).

My co-founder and I started working on this nearly a year ago, having run similar small builds for over four years. This time we’ve tried to do it properly. The execution is relatively simple - similar to an eNPS (Net Promoter Score - a common way of measuring how consumers like your product or service), but we wanted a way to anonymously pass candid feedback from employees to managers and executives about their workplace experience, their jobs, new ideas... anything. And for it to be regular and easy to do.

We maintain the anonymity of the staff member (and let them know how many people are in the team receiving the question being asked, so they understand their level of safety). We show the team leads and managers a sentiment score and verbatim comments), but we do not associate the respondent details with those in the backend. This is somewhat different to currently existing tools that tend to use the term ‘confidential’, which means you're not anonymous if the admin permissions are high enough. Even those systems which claim to be anonymous can often have ways of twisting the data to unmask the users.

One of our team is working on natural language processing to understand, summarise and report on sentiment, comment themes and trends. We’re making it easy to add AMAs, poll clients and partner businesses, and we’re experimenting with sports organisations, unions, and within schools and education.

It runs over SMS (the highest response rate of any method we tested). Unfortunately, it does need a signup and confirmation (apologies) to try, but it’s free to test, and there’s no credit card required. Unfortunately, we only support the US, Canada, Australia and the U.K. at the moment but are looking to expand support as soon as possible.

We have only really been live for eight weeks now. We would love any feedback you have for us and hope you find it useful! You can email us at hello@runsignals.com if you have feedback or want to chat.

Show HN: Anonymous Feedback Tool for Teams
runsignals.com

How do I as an employee know that I'm truly anonymous and that my employer won't be able to pay you/sue you and get you to tell them who wrote something?

Thanks for the question! Absolutely understand the scepticism. We have a user ID that we match to the Twilio response, so staff can't submit multiple answers. We delete our data from Twilio after seven days at the moment (Twilio mandated min); we’re working on a 1-hour retention policy via their Rest API. We’re always working toward minimising any end-user identifiers back to comments.

For me, there's also our reputation - if we claim we're protecting users and then don't, our product would be over quickly.

integration with imessage would be the most valuable. where internet is strong, but cell signal is weak, SMS is really brutal. that's my life. any data that can't flow "over the internet" is just ridiculous at this point

> and let them know how many people are in the team receiving the question being asked, so they understand their level of safety

How do you prevent attacks that involve the employer having 209 fake respondents, and 1 actual respondent?