Public consultations, student panels and university studies have needs of their own. People need time to think about complex questions, sensitive topics need care, and the data protection has to stand up to an ethics committee or a procurement team. Qualzy has been used for all of them, from a transport consultation community running since 2020 to a dissertation that's now a published journal paper.
Compared with most commercial work, the participants are more varied and the methods get more scrutiny.
A consultation is worth more when people have read the evidence and thought about it, so the research has to run over days, weeks or months.
Wellbeing, safety and gambling need handling with care, whatever the method. Online, participants need privacy, and researchers need control over who sees what.
Ethics applications and procurement questionnaires ask where data is held, how consent is managed and who is certified. The answers need to be on paper.
Grant and dissertation budgets are tight. Every hour saved on transcription and admin is an hour, or a participant, the project gets back.
When Transport for West Midlands needed a long-running public consultation platform for a £5 billion investment programme, Mustard Research built the "Keep WM Moving!" community on Qualzy. It launched in 2020, it's still running, and it has thousands of members.
The community covers public transport, road safety and regional planning across the West Midlands. Qualzy handles the technical setup for complex builds like this one, with several cohorts, separate topics and control over which participants can see each other's posts. Community members have also been recruited into in-person meetings with the client.
Read the Mustard Research story"In long term communities like this I really feel we are using Qualzy in the best possible way."
Anthony Shephard-Williams, Director, Mustard Research
Some questions need people to engage with the information before they answer. Over several days, participants can read the evidence, live with the question and come back with a more considered position. Because each person's answers are kept together over time, you can see what shifted their view.
Release activities in a set order, so participants see the evidence before they're asked to weigh it. Pre-tasks can cover reading or a video before the main discussion opens.
Participants post their view and, where you allow it, read and reply to each other's. Card sorts and card scores show how they rank the options, and why.
A Qualzy Discussion suits a deliberation over a few days or weeks. A Qualzy Community suits a programme that returns to the same people for months or years.
Universities use Qualzy in two ways: insight teams listening to students and staff, and academics running qualitative studies for their own research.
Warwick's Market Research & Insight team was watching survey response rates fall. In a two-week pilot, 145 students posted 863 times, with 54 images and 20 videos, and engagement reached 74%. The permanent Warwick Student Panel now has 464 active students.
Some of the panel's work is on wellbeing and feelings of safety, so participants control what other members can see and what stays private. The panel was presented at the Times Higher Education Market Insights Conference in December 2023.
"We are often asking quite deep questions, especially around things like wellbeing and feelings of safety. We must manage how we interact, keep people safe, and protect their identity. Qualzy allows us to do that."
Alicia Buckley, Associate Director MR&I, University of Warwick
For her psychology dissertation, Ella Goldstein asked 32 people who bet on sports to screen-record themselves using their own betting app, narrating what they saw as they went. She built the study herself with no programming background, and every recording arrived transcribed, which she estimates saved at least 30 hours of typing.
The dissertation was marked at 84%, the top mark in her year, and a co-authored paper from it has been published in a top journal in the addictions field.
"I don't think our sample size would have been feasible within the context of an undergraduate dissertation without effective auto transcription."
Dr Philip Newall, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Bristol
"It made the process far more efficient and gave me more time to get stuck into the data and deepen my analysis."
Ella Goldstein, University of Bristol
More university work on our academic research success stories.
Qualzy is made by Dipolar, a research technology group with companies in the UK, the US and Australia. Security and compliance documents are in the Trust Centre, available on request.
Qualzy's information security management system is certified to ISO 27001:2022, independently audited, with annual surveillance audits.
Participant consent is managed in the platform with a full audit trail. Data processing agreements are available on request.
The right to be forgotten, data retention settings and subject access requests are all handled inside the platform.
Qualzy runs separately in the UK, the US and Australia, and each project is hosted in the region it's created in. The Australian Privacy Act and CCPA are covered too.
Data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Researcher and admin accounts use multi-factor authentication, and moderator, observer, recruiter and admin roles control what each person can see and do.
Nothing participants say is used to train AI models, and every key point links back to the participant's own words, so findings can be checked.
The full detail is on our trust and security page.
Participants join from a link and take part in a web browser on any device, with nothing to install. They can respond in their own language, more than 30 in all, and you read a translation beside the original.
For live conversations, Qualzy Live runs video interviews and focus groups, and in-person interviews recorded on your phone or iPad, in the same project as the online work.
Pay per project for a one-off study, with no monthly fee. Subscribe if your team researches most months. A long-running community is billed monthly and priced by panel size.
There are no seat licences, so supervisors, co-investigators and stakeholders can all be added as observers, and AI features are included on every plan. Find out more about pricing.
As long as the programme needs. The "Keep WM Moving!" community that Mustard Research run for Transport for West Midlands has been running since 2020. For a deliberation over a few days or weeks, a Qualzy Discussions project is the better fit.
Yes. You decide whether participants can see each other's posts, and the University of Warwick's student panel lets participants control what other members can see. That's what makes research on topics like wellbeing and safety workable.
Qualzy runs separately in the UK, the US and Australia, and each project is hosted in the region it's created in. Trust and security has the detail.
Yes. Data processing agreements are available on request, and our security documentation is in the Trust Centre.
Yes. Ella Goldstein built her University of Bristol dissertation study on Qualzy herself, with no programming background. If you'd rather not, send us your protocol and our team can build the study for you.
No. Participants join from a link and take part in a web browser on any device, with nothing to install.
Tell us who you need to hear from, for how long, and what your ethics or procurement process will ask. By the end of the call you'll have a clear picture of how Qualzy could work for you.
