Publish results to a public link
Purpose
Expose a campaign's completed results at a read-only web address that needs no sign-in — and decide how much of them to show.
Who this is for
Account administrators and campaign managers.
Before you start
Read the disclosure choice below before you publish anything. Publishing is a deliberate, public act: anyone with the link can read what you include, and search engines are not the only way a link travels.
Publish
- Open the campaign.
- Choose Publish results in the header.
- Set the three switches (see below).
- Choose Publish.
The dialog then shows the public URL with a Copy button and an open-in-new-tab
button. The page lives at /results/<key>.
The three switches
The dialog opens the block by saying what it means to save it: "These switches are the whole configuration. Publishing replaces the previous settings rather than merging with them, so anything switched off here is switched off on the public page as soon as you save." Re-publishing is therefore a rewrite, not an amendment — read all three before you press Update.
Include per-participant answers
- Off (default) — the published page carries aggregate figures only: assessment count, completed submission count, participant count, and completed submissions per assessment. No individual answers.
- On — the published page also carries each completed submission's answers.
Anonymize participants
Only meaningful when answers are included. On (default) it does two things: it replaces names and email addresses with "Participant 1", "Participant 2" and so on, and it withholds every answer somebody typed or uploaded. Off shows the real names, email addresses and every answer verbatim.
The second half is the one worth reading twice. An anonymised publication carries an answer only when your questionnaire declared every value that answer could take — a choice list, a matrix row against its declared columns, a rating, a yes/no. Those are published with their labels. Everything else is withheld and reported as a count instead:
| What you asked | What the public page shows |
|---|---|
| A choice, a rating, a yes/no, a matrix | The answer, by its label |
| A number box (a text question set to accept numbers) | No one organisation's figure. Instead: how many answered, the cohort total, the cohort average and a spread — see An aggregate instead of a number below |
| A text or comment box | "Written answer — withheld to keep the report anonymous", and how many people answered |
| A grid where each column is its own question | Column by column: the scale columns publish, the written ones are named as withheld — see A grid published column by column below |
| A file upload | "Uploaded evidence — withheld to keep the report anonymous", and how many people attached one |
| An answer this app cannot recognise | "Answer format not recognised — withheld to keep the report anonymous", and the count |
Nothing is partially masked. A half-hidden sentence still gives away its length and its shape, and in a cohort of forty organisations that is often enough to identify the author — which is the whole reason the label said "Participant 7" in the first place.
The counts are there so the withheld questions do not read as unanswered. "41 of 46 organisations described the evidence they hold" is a fact a stakeholder needs and one that names nobody.
An aggregate instead of a number
"How many staff work with models?" is a text box, so the answer itself stays withheld: a staff count against one organisation in a cohort of forty is the organisation. But the totals are not disclosive, and they are usually what the question was asked for. So where your questionnaire declared a question numeric, the published page carries an aggregate beside the response count:
- how many people answered it,
- the total across them,
- the average, and
- a spread across fixed size bands — under 10, 10 to under 100, 100 to under 1,000, and so on up.
The bands are powers of ten, the same for every question in every campaign, and they are fixed in the product rather than calculated from your data. A band edge chosen from the answers would leak the answers.
Three things it deliberately does not show:
- No highest and no lowest. Each of those is one organisation's exact answer with an aggregate's name on it.
- Nothing at all below five responses. A question fewer than five people answered keeps its response count and gets no aggregate. The same floor as the maturity profile — see Small groups are withheld below.
- No band with fewer than five people in it. "One organisation is between 10,000 and 100,000" beside a published total points at that organisation. So the bands you see need not add up to the response count, and the page says so.
A question that asks for several numbers at once (a headcount and a budget line, say) is aggregated field by field, so the headcount eight people answered can publish while the budget line three people answered does not.
Two conditions have to hold, and both are deliberate. The questionnaire must have declared the question numeric — a comment box everyone happened to answer with a number is still a comment box, and its "average" would be meaningless. And every stored answer must really be a number: one "about a dozen" and the aggregate is dropped for the whole question rather than computed over the answers that happened to parse.
A grid published column by column
A grid question — one row per discipline, one column per thing you asked about it — is usually a mix. Four columns are scales and the fifth is "anything else?". Publishing the whole question would publish the comments; withholding it would lose four columns of scores to protect one column of prose.
So each column is judged on its own. The scale, rating and yes/no columns publish with their labels, row by row. The written and uploaded columns are withheld, and each one is named in the withheld list with its own reason and its own count — so a reader can tell "this column was withheld" from "this column was never asked".
One shape is still withheld whole: a grid where respondents add their own rows stores no row labels to publish against, so there is nothing to disclose a column against and the question keeps its response count only.
If you need the written answers themselves, they are in the export — a spreadsheet you control who receives — not on a public link.
Turning answers on and anonymisation off makes the dialog display a warning in amber: "Participant names, emails and answer content will be publicly visible." Take it literally: that publication carries the free text and the file names as typed.
The published page states which of the three modes it is in, in plain words, so a reader knows what they are looking at.
Include maturity profile
The third switch, and the independent one. It publishes the campaign's aggregate Maturity Profile — domain levels against the target. That figure carries no answer content and names nobody, so it does not depend on either switch above: you can publish a profile from a wave whose answers stay private. Segments with too few respondents are withheld from it regardless — see Small groups are withheld below. When no profile is available for the campaign the switch is disabled and the dialog says why.
What the public page shows
- The campaign name and description, when the wave closed, and when the page was published. Those last two are different facts: the close date is what the numbers are as at, and a wave still collecting says so instead.
- Three summary cards: Assessments, Completed submissions, Participants.
- A per-assessment completion table, naming your Active and Completed assessments. A Draft assessment is not named and its submissions are not counted — see the gotchas below.
- The aggregate maturity profile, if you included it — and the public page shows less of it than your own report does. See Small groups are withheld below.
- The questions that were answered but not published, with a count each, if the publication is anonymised.
- The responses, if you included them — each answer under its own question title, with choices and matrix rows spelled out rather than left as codes.
- A Print / Save as PDF button. It prints the report without the app chrome, keeps the charts and tables whole across pages, and carries the campaign name and close date at the top. This is the document to circulate to stakeholders.
- A Download JSON button, which hands the visitor the whole published dataset as a file.
That last point matters: publishing with answers included means publishing a downloadable dataset, not just a web page.
Small groups are withheld
The maturity profile can be broken down by segment — by province, by practitioner role, and by whatever else the questionnaire asks. A breakdown of a small group is not anonymous in practice: "the four people in this territory scored 2.1" identifies four people to anyone who knows who they are.
So there are two thresholds, and they are deliberately different:
| Where | Threshold | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Your own report, workbook and PDF | 3 respondents | A segment — or a single domain inside one — with fewer than three people behind it shows as withheld rather than as a score. |
| The published public page | 5 respondents | A segment or domain with fewer than five is not on the page at all: not the score, not the name, not the headcount. |
The lower figure is for you, reading your own respondents' data, where a report with most of its segments withheld is a report you cannot use. The higher one is the conventional floor for a published aggregate, and it applies to anyone with the link.
What follows from it:
- A segment you can see on your own screen may simply be absent from the public page. That is the control working, not a bug.
- The campaign-wide figures are never withheld. Suppression is about segments — a number for the whole cohort attributes nothing to anybody.
- A withheld segment leaves no trace publicly. There is no "withheld" row to click, and no headcount, because a headcount beside a segment name is most of the disclosure.
- Neither threshold is a setting you can change from the app. They live in the platform's report definition; ask your administrator if a wave needs different ones.
Change or withdraw
Reopen Publish Results at any time.
- Change a switch and choose Update to republish with the new disclosure level.
- Choose Unpublish to take it down. The dialog then reads "Not published — results are private."
Withdrawing stops the link resolving, but it cannot recall copies already downloaded.
Limits and gotchas
- Only completed submissions are published. Drafts never appear.
- Only assessments you have put to respondents are named: Active or Completed. A Draft assessment is withheld completely — not its title, not its id, and not its submissions, which are also absent from the three summary cards. So the per-assessment counts always add up to the campaign total. If a set you expected is missing from the page, check its Publish State.
- An assessment with no status set at all — the shape the legacy import left behind — is treated as publishable.
- Withheld answers cannot be unlocked switch by switch. The choice is anonymised (labels and counts) or not anonymised (everything verbatim, with names); there is no per-question setting.
- The public link is the only protection — there is no password on the published page.
- The two suppression thresholds mean your own report and the public page can disagree about which segments exist. Check the public page itself before telling a stakeholder a breakdown is there.
- This is a campaign-level action. There is no per-assessment or per-participant publishing.
- Publishing results is separate from publishing an assessment. One shares outcomes; the other opens a questionnaire. See Publish and preview an assessment.