Everything in our listening process depends on people trusting us
All of our listening process depends on people trusting us with what they tell us. Here’s exactly how we protect that.
Your name never appears on the listening pages or in any reports – this is called “de-identification”
Whether you share an issue online, speak at a Kitchen Table Conversation, or Like something on this site, we only ever record your suburb, gender, age band and postcode alongside what you’ve told us.
Small groups are never shown
If a category of response is small enough that someone could reasonably be identified from it — a rare combination of suburb, gender, and age, for instance — it’s left out of our public reporting entirely, rather than shown at reduced confidence.
We sort issues three ways
So patterns can be found without anyone having to read every single submission: by broad theme (social, environmental, economic, or governance), by which of our working groups it belongs to, and by a general policy area. None of this changes what was said — it only makes it possible to see what’s rising to the top.
We don’t turn your input into a policy – we leave that to your political representatives
That’s a deliberate line we hold. Our job is to listen accurately and represent it faithfully — what’s done with it is a matter for candidates and elected representatives, and for you to hold them accountable to. They can use our data to formulate policies and guide their priorities and voting intentions. That is the nature of the relationship between “Voices Groups” (the community side) and “Community Independents” (the political side). The two arms commit to a common purpose of improving democratic representation and shared values integrity and transparency of community democracy demands full legal and financial separation.
Questions about how your information is handled, or want something removed? Contact us.