The HiVE 2018 year in review

2018 was another big year for The HiVE, with a range of new tools, features and upgrades added to the platform. With a philosophy that SaaS products should never be the same as the day you bought them, we delivered a total of 59 releases over the course of the year, including 14 major releases and 45 minor releases.

New participation tools

We introduced three new significant participation tools to The HiVE’s toolbox, giving you a range of new ways to engage your community and collect appropriate data.

Gather

The Gather tool helps you crowd-source content from your users and can be used to collect stories, run ideation processes or even sponsor competitions. Participants respond to your prompt with pictures, videos and text which are then displayed in a highly attractive multi-media ‘wall’ of posts.

The tool can be then be used in more social and deliberative ways, allowing other participants to vote on contributions, or even enter into discussion threads on each other’s posts. Custom categories can be used allowing so responses can be easily filtered.

Question and Answer

The new Question and Answer builds transparency into discussions between you and your community, allowing participants to submit their questions directly to you. ‘Listeners’ or nominated personnel can be nominated to field questions, and participants have the ability to direct their questions to a specific staff member or team. Other participants can also vote on the questions they want to see answered by you.

Questions can be answered by one of the nominated ‘listeners’, and their response is clearly, it is displayed publicly for other users to see. Participants can also give you feedback on your response by upvoting or downvoting on the answer.

Fund It

Fund It is a powerful participatory budgeting tool which helps you engage your community on important spending decisions or prioritising things. The activity works by assigning a budget of ‘money’ or ‘points’, and setting up a menu of options they can spend their budget on. In the process, participants are forced to make trade-offs between each item, reflecting a more realistic context where they can’t have everything.

The tool has a multitude of applications including budgeting, participatory grantmaking, voting, prioritisation and more.

New content tools

We love great content, and have added even more new ways to create great looking, interactive content to engage your users. In 2018, five new content tools were added to the platform.

InstaFeed

InstaFeed allows you to display images from your Instagram account directly on your project websites. Selected images can be pulled from the account that match a certain hashtag or can be filtered from a geographic tag of a specific location - a great feature for place-based engagements.

Call to Action

The Call to Action tool is a flexible tool that can be used to add visual interest to the page, break up long blocks of content, and direct users to key actions. It presents a block of colour or background image, with a large title, a short description and up to two call to action buttons that can be used to link to an internal page, external url or file download.

VR View

VR View is our first foray into the world of virtual reality, allowing your participants to explore 360 degree panoramic images. Visitors can pan around the panorama with their mouse to get a full 360 degree view or, on mobile devices, pan the image by simply by moving the phone around.

But the really exciting part is that the tool can be turned into ‘VR’ mode on mobile devices and used with compatible VR goggles (such as Google Cardboard) for a more immersive, virtual experience.

Logo Splash

Logo Splash makes it easy to present an array of logos in an attractive way to visitors. It takes the pain away from having to resize, orient and fit a group of logos onto the page in a way that doesn't take away from the important content. You can use this tool to give your partners the credit they deserve.

Faces

Faces is a versatile tool that can be used to personalise your websites and give them a human touch. The tool lets you create small 'feature vignettes' of a person’s image, name and description and can be used to create ‘who’s listening’ block, present a citizen jury or judges panel, or even create ‘vox pops’ of what people were saying at one of your face to face events.

New features

The back end of the platform also underwent a huge amount of growth 2018, especially in the reporting areas.

People reporting

The People report leverages data collected from your Members so you can better understand your participants' demographic and spatial profiles, and interests. This is important to start to understand who you are talking to in your engagement as opposed to just what they are saying.

It will also help you to measure community representation, which should be one of your big goals of 2020.

Form reporting

The new Form reporting features help take the pain out of analysing your survey data. The new report is both functional and beautiful, and help you automatically crunch your results, visualise the outcomes in interactive visualisation, and turn them into stunning, exportable reports.

Scheduled publishing

The scheduled publishing feature now means you can make updates to your websites whenever you want, even when you’re not around. Content changes can now be published at predetermined times allowing you to publish new projects, open or close engagement activities, and update content automatically.

Subscription management page

Nobody likes being Spammed with emails that are too frequent, so we’ve made it easier for your Members to manage their email subscriptions without having to log in to their user profiles. By following the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the emails they receive, they are now taken to a page that makes it simple to set which email notifications they want to receive or not receive.

Eight new reporting metrics

A host of new reporting metrics were introduced into the Overview Report including:

Activity by Contribution - shows the number of Contributors, Contributions, and percentage of Contributions by Participation Activity.
Top Activities - shows the five participation activities with the most Contributions along with the number of Contributors.
Top Visited Projects - shows the five projects with the most visits along with the number of Visitors and Visitation Rate. This metric is displayed in the 'Sitewide', 'Team', 'Project Group', and 'My Projects' Report Types.
Top Visited Pages - shows the five pages with the most Visits along with the number of Visitors and Visitation Rate. This metric is displayed in the Project Report Type.
Engagement Time - shows the aggregate amount of Active Time users have spent on a project including the date with the highest visitation and the day with the highest avg. visitation.
Follower Activity - shows actions related to your followers including the number of Followers, New Followers, Follows and New Follows. This metric is displayed in the 'Team', 'Project Group', and 'My Projects' Report Types.
Visitor Profile - shows the split between First Time Visitors and Returning Visitors.
Referral Types - shows how Visitors arrived at your site (e.g. direct, search engine, websites, social media, other).

Privacy improvements

Ensuring privacy of information is key to building trust within your community. To ensure your participants are clear in their privacy requirements, we added the ability to turn on a ‘privacy consent checkbox’ across all participation tools. This requires the participant check the box to leave feedback, establishing more explicit consent.

Team and Group reporting

Group and Team report types allow for aggregated reporting of projects associated with a common group or team.

Improvements

We didn’t just build new things in 2018: we also improved on what we had. Here’s some of the highlights.

A new and improved Social Map

We were thrilled to announce a major upgrade to the Social Map tool – one that takes the tool above and beyond the industry standard for spatial engagement tools. Fast-loading vector-based maps, 10 new base maps, support for map layers and masks, customisable categories and icons, improved address geocoding and even the ability to view maps in 3D make this the most flexible and comprehensive product of its kind.

Updates to Gallery

We took the Image Gallery tool, renamed it Gallery and gave it a major facelift. We added options to add video embeds from YouTube and Vimeo, select from three new display styles and updated the ‘lightbox’ overlay to include zoom controls, thumbnail galleries, slideshows, and download functionalities.

More Newsfeed control

We added the ability for you to control how many items you want to appear in the Newsfeed tool and how they load in. This gives you greater flexibility on whether to show just the most recent items, or all items.

New block settings UI

With so many settings for some of the tools, it can be hard to know what each setting does. We gave the block settings user interface (UI) an overhaul to create a more consistent and usable experience by creating more logical and consistent headings, including more helpful descriptions, and turning things into easy to understand ‘on/off’ switches where appropriate.

Fund It got better and better

In the second half of 2018, we made further improvements to the Fund It tool by adding video support. You can now create even more dynamic, content-driven experiences with the tool to drive engagement with your community.

New ‘Matrix/Likert’ question for the Form

We added a new 'Matrix/Likert-scale' question type to the Form tool, allowing you to ask structure closed-ended questions in your surveys. This allows you to ask participants about multiple items within a single question, presenting multiple choice questions in a grid.

A more flexible Follow function

We’ve made changes to the Follow function to allow the feature to be turned on or off for individual projects, rather than restricting this to a sitewide setting.

Better page versioning

We added the ability to view more than 10 ‘versions’ of a draft page, helping you to dive back in time and view or track back to previous versions of your pages.

2018 was certainly another busy year for our hard-working team, and we’d like to thank all of our existing customers for being with us over the last 12 months. We hope you are enjoying the new tools and features and we look forward to seeing how you will use them to push the boundaries of digital engagement in 2019.

If you are not yet a customer and are considering a community engagement platform or looking to upgrade from an existing platform, we encourage you to check out our demo site to see some of the tools in action, or get in touch to learn more.

Version 2.0 - Effective from September 2021

This Privacy Policy describes how Social Pinpoint Pty Ltd (“Social Pinpoint”, “we”, “us” or “our”) (ABN: 12 148 958 927) collects, protects, discloses, stores and uses your personal information through its provision of online software applications and other digital products (the “Software”) and services (together, the “Services”).

Our Software is operated by an external operator (the “Operator”) who licences the Software from Social Pinpoint and may, from time to time, collect information for various reasons outlined in their Privacy Policy, Privacy Statement, or any other applicable Agreement. You should check these documents and ensure you are comfortable with how the Operator will collect and handle your personal information.

This Privacy Policy has been prepared to take into account the following privacy laws:

Australia - Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (“Privacy Act") and the Australian Privacy Principles (“APPs"). See Appendix 1 for Privacy Act and APP specific provisions.
Canada - The Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
European Union - General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“GDPR”). See Appendix 2 for GDPR specific provisions.
New Zealand - Privacy Act 2020.

If the Operator is a government entity or located in another jurisdiction, we may also contractually agree to comply with additional privacy laws.

What information is collected?

Personal Information

Customers:

In providing its Services, the type of personal information collected by Social Pinpoint may include (but may not be limited to) the following types of information, when this information is shared:

Your name
Email address
Phone number
The organisation you work for
Your job title
Your preferences and opinions with respect to the Services
Details of the Services requested by you and provided to you and Social Pinpoint’s response to you, including with respect to any support requests
Any feedback you provide to Social Pinpoint, including in any feedback surveys
Your IP address
Other unique ID numbers
Any other personal information requested by Social Pinpoint and/or provided to Social Pinpoint by you or by a third party.

Users of our Services:

The Operator may collect a range of personal information from you when you use our Services (whether as a staff admin user for the Operator or as a visitor to the Operator’s website), depending on their specific requirements and needs. Personal information may be collected in a range of ways including through a registration process or through various activities and interactions on the site.

The type of personal information collected will vary between Operators and may include (but may not be limited to) the following types of information, when this information is shared:

Your name
Email address
Username
Profile picture
Phone number
Your IP address
User-agent string
Other unique ID numbers
Social network account IDs
Physical address, postcode, or other locational attributes
Demographic information such as age, gender, etc.
Information about your preferences
Your recorded thoughts, ideas, opinions, etc. as expressed by you. This may include sensitive information if you provide political opinions.

You will need to check the Privacy Policy of the Operator to confirm what personal information is collected.

Where an Operator collects your personal information, this personal information may also be collected and accessed by Social Pinpoint in fulfilling our duties and responsibilities to the Operator and to internally analyse and improve our Services and Software.

Cookie Policy

Our websites use cookies to record and log data. We use both session-based and persistent cookies, dependent upon how you use or interact with our websites.

Cookies are small data files sent by us to your computer, or from your computer or mobile device to us each time you visit our website. They are unique to you or your web browser. Session-based cookies last only while your browser is open and are automatically deleted when you close your browser. Persistent cookies last until you or your browser delete them, or until they expire.

When you use one of our websites, we may use technologies such as cookies to store information about your visit. If you have provided us with personal information, cookies may be associated with this information.

We use this information to better understand how people use our websites, to improve our products, to ensure that we give you the best experience we can, to detect fraud or abuse and to help our customers learn about which engagements and content most matter to their communities.

If you do not wish to have cookies enabled, or wish to be notified of their use, most modern browsers will allow you to adjust this in the settings. Please note that disabling the use of cookies on our software may result in restricted/impacted functionality, and you may not be able to take full advantage of the service.

We use the following categories of cookies on our sites:

Necessary cookies

These cookies are essential to enable you to browse around our websites and use its features. Without these cookies, functionality related to certain tools and accessing secure areas of the site could not be provided.

Preferences cookies

Also known as “functionality cookies,” these cookies allow a website to remember the choices you have made in the past, like what language you prefer or what your username and password is so that you can automatically log in next time.

Statistical cookies

Also known as “performance cookies,” these cookies collect information about how you use a website, like which pages you visited and which links you clicked on. The purpose of this information is to help understand how users are engaging with the website and to improve website functions.

Operators may also use cookies on our Software. Operators are responsible for notifying you of the cookies they use and how you can control which cookies are enabled.

Links

This Privacy Policy does not apply to third party websites or digital services which may be linked to content published by either Social Pinpoint or the Operator. We recommend you read the privacy statement of the relevant service when you access these third party sites.

How do we use your information?

Customers:

Social Pinpoint may use information it collects (personal or otherwise) in order to:

provide our Services to you
allow you to access our Software
send you updates and information where you have consented or would reasonably expect to receive them
respond to your enquiries
to request your feedback
maintain our licenced Software
for internal record keeping, administrative, invoicing and billing purposes
detect and rectify fraud or other behavior that violates any terms of use
comply with our contractual or legal obligations and resolve any disputes that we may have
conduct de-identified research, analytics and business development
improve our Services, Software and our website
if otherwise required or authorised by law

Users of our Services:

Social Pinpoint may access and use the information collected by the Operator (personal or otherwise) in order to:

allow you to access our Software
respond to your enquiries
maintain our licenced Software
detect and rectify fraud or other behaviour that violates any terms of use
respond to service requests from the Operator
comply with our contractual or legal obligations and resolve any disputes that we may have
monitor sites to ensure adequate safety and security
conduct de-identified research, analytics and business development
improve our Software and services
if otherwise required or authorised by law

How do we protect your information?

Social Pinpoint takes the privacy of your information very seriously, and we use industry standard practices to keep your data safe and secure.

How do we disclose your personal information?

Customers:

In providing the Services, our Software and our website Social Pinpoint may disclose your personal information to:

our third party helpdesk management provider for customer support tickets
our third party email management system to send email updates and notifications
our employees, contractors and/or related entities
our existing or potential agents or business partners
anyone to whom our business or assets (or any part of them) are, or may (in good faith) be, transferred
credit reporting agencies, courts, tribunals and regulatory authorities, in the event you fail to pay for goods or services we have provided to you
courts, tribunals, regulatory authorities and law enforcement officers, as required by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings, or in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights
any other third parties as required or permitted by law, such as where we receive a subpoena

Users of our Services:

In providing the Services and our website, Social Pinpoint may disclose your personal information to:

our third party email management system to send email updates and notifications
our third party authentication and authorisation provider for our Software, if enabled
other third party service providers for the management of security, fraud detection, internal logs, basemaps and geocoding services, content moderators, graphic providers, web mapping tools and software which allows for the functionality of a browser
Social media sites when you choose to share content or authenticate your user account through them
any other third parties as required or permitted by law, such as where we receive a subpoena

Contact us

To contact us about our Privacy Policy, compliance with any applicable privacy laws, or to modify or delete your personal data, please email our Privacy Officer at: info@socialpinpoint.com

The Privacy Officer will review all messages received and respond to each message upon due consideration. We may require further information to respond to your message, or may refer you to the Operator when appropriate.

Changes to this Policy

We reserve the right to modify this policy from time to time, at our sole discretion. If we make a material change to the Privacy Policy we will notify you and the modified policy shall be effective once we notify you of the change. If we do not make any material amendments then we will post the modified policy on our website and it shall be effective once posted. We recommend that you regularly check our website to make sure you are aware of our most up-to-date policy.

Appendix 1 – The Privacy Act and the APPs

The Privacy Act and the APPs set out the core requirements for the protection of personal information in Australia. Please read the Privacy Policy above and this Appendix carefully and contact us at the details at the end of the Privacy Policy if you have any questions

How do I access, change or delete my personal information?

In some cases you may be able to access and correct your personal information by logging into your account (if the Software provides this functionality), where you can update your personal details.

You may also request a copy of, changes to, or deletion of, the personal information we hold, and we will act on this request within a reasonable period of time unless we are legally permitted to refuse to do so, in which case we will provide you with details of our refusal in writing.

Before acting on your request we may be contractually required to provide notification to or seek the consent of the Operator.

Social Pinpoint will endeavour to respond to your request or inquiry within 30 days.

How do I make a complaint?

If you wish to make a complaint, please contact us using the details in the contact section above and provide us with full details of the complaint. We will promptly investigate your complaint and respond to you, in writing, setting out the outcome of our investigation and the steps we will take in response to your complaint. If you are not satisfied with our response you also have the right to contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Will my personal information be transferred overseas?

Where we disclose your personal information to third parties in our Privacy Policy, these third parties may store, transfer or access personal information outside of Australia, including but not limited to the United States of America and the Philippines.

We will only disclose your personal information to countries with laws which protect your personal information in a way which is substantially similar to the Australian Privacy Principles or we will take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure the third party protects your personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles.

Appendix 2 – The GDPR

Under the GDPR individuals located in the EU have extra rights which apply to their personal information. Personal information under the GDPR is often referred to as personal data and is defined as information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (individual). This Appendix sets out the additional rights we give to individuals located in the EU when we sign a GDPR compliant data processing agreement with an Operator, including how we process personal information lawfully, transparently and fairly. Please read the Privacy Policy above and this Appendix carefully and contact us at the details at the end of the Privacy Policy if you have any questions.

What personal information is relevant?

This Appendix applies to the personal information set out in the Privacy Policy above where we sign a GDPR compliant data processing agreement with an Operator. This includes any sensitive information also listed in the Privacy Policy above which is known as ‘special categories of data’ under the GDPR.

Our commitment to you

Your personal information will:

be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner by us;
only be collected for the specific purposes we have identified in the ‘collection and use of personal information’ clause above and personal information will not be further processed in a manner that is incompatible with the purposes we have identified;
be collected in a way that is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purpose for which the personal information is processed;
be kept up to date, where it is possible and within our control to do so (please let us know if you would like us to rectify any of your personal information);
be kept in a form which permits us to identify you, but only for so long as necessary for the purposes for which the personal information was collected or required by an applicable controller; and
be processed securely and in a way that protects against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage.

How do we process personal information?

If the GDPR applies and we act as a controller, we must have a legal basis to process your personal information. We will process your personal information in accordance with the following legal bases:

Legitimate interests: We will process your personal information for our legitimate interests to allow you to access and use our website, to send you marketing content we think may be of interest to you, to contact you if you leave your contact details with us or if you otherwise initiate contact with us, to review and improve our Services and for our internal business purposes.
Performing a contract: We will rely on performing a contract to process your personal information where we are preparing to enter into a contract with you or we are carrying out our obligations under a contract with you, including where you have entered into a contract with us for our Services or the licensing of our Software.
Legal obligation: We will rely on a legal obligation to process your personal information where we are subject to a legal obligation, including to respond to any illegal activity and for taxation purposes.
Consent: If we need to rely on consent, we will ask for consent to process any of your personal information for that specific purpose before we process your personal information for that purpose.

Upon written request, we may provide you with a list of the third parties we use to process your personal information and the locations of those third parties.

Data retention

If the GDPR applies or we have signed a GDPR compliant data processing agreement, and we act as a processor:

We will only retain your personal information in accordance with the controller’s instructions and we will delete or return your personal information to the controller in accordance with the terms of the applicable data processing agreement.

If the GDPR applies and we act as a controller:

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information, whether we can achieve those purposes through other means and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see ‘access, erasure and data portability’ below for further information.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for analytics, research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this anonymised information indefinitely without further notice to you.

Data transfers

The countries to which we send data for the purposes listed above may not have the same data protection laws as the country in which you initially provided the information. If we transfer your personal information to third parties in other countries:

we will perform those transfers in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR (for example, by using the Standard Contractual Clauses as a safeguard); and
we will protect the transferred personal information in accordance with the Privacy Policy, as supplemented by this Appendix.

Countries to which we may transfer personal data include Australia, the Philippines and the United States of America.

Extra rights for EU individuals

Objecting to processing:

You have the right to object to processing of your personal information that is based on our legitimate interests or public interest. If this is done, we must provide compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which overrides your interests, rights and freedoms, in order to proceed with the processing of your personal information.

Restricting processing:

You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal information if:

you are concerned about the accuracy of your personal information
you believe your personal information has been unlawfully processed
you need us to maintain the personal information solely for the purpose of a legal claim
we are in the process of considering your objection in relation to processing on the basis of legitimate interests

Access, erasure and data portability:

You may have the right to request details of the personal information we hold about you, or to request that we erase the personal information we hold about you, or that we transfer this information to a third party.

Rectification:

If you believe that any information we hold about you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, please contact us using the details below. We will take reasonable steps to promptly correct any information found to be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading or out of date.

Note that if we are acting as a processor of your personal information, before acting on a rights request we will need to seek the instructions of the relevant Operator.

If the GDPR applies and we act as a controller of your personal information, we will endeavour to respond to your request or inquiry within 30 days.

Social Pinpoint

2018 year in review

New participation tools

Gather

Question and Answer

Fund It

New content tools

InstaFeed

Call to Action

VR View

Logo Splash

Faces

New features

People reporting

Form reporting

Scheduled publishing

Subscription management page

Eight new reporting metrics

Privacy improvements

Team and Group reporting

Improvements

A new and improved Social Map

Updates to Gallery

More Newsfeed control

New block settings UI

Fund It got better and better

New ‘Matrix/Likert’ question for the Form

A more flexible Follow function

Better page versioning

Follow this blog

The HiVE is a complete community engagement solution that supports you in the online participation process, broadens your reach and informs better decision making.

Company

LEGAL

Software

Resources

Support

Participation tools