What a sponsored workspace means
For companies whose workspace was set up by a consultancy: who pays, who can see what, what the consultant can and cannot read, and how to take over billing.
On this page
If a consultancy set this workspace up for you, it is sponsored: it runs on their licence and nothing is billed to you. You will see a line at the top of every page saying who pays for it.
This page answers the questions that usually follow.
Is it our workspace or theirs?
Yours. The consultant created it and pays for it, but the workspace, the surveys and the results belong to your company, and at least one person here is an owner with full control. That is not a courtesy: surveys cannot be published here at all until somebody on your side is an owner, precisely so you are never in a position of having paid for results you cannot reach.
What can the consultant see?
The same thing you can: aggregate results. Nobody, including them, including us, can read one person's answer.
Answers are encrypted in each respondent's browser before they are sent. What reaches our servers is ciphertext, so what we store is ciphertext and what we could hand to anyone, under any kind of pressure, is ciphertext. Your aggregate results are decrypted in your browser, using a key your workspace holds. The consultant can read them because somebody here gave them a copy of that key.
Can we take their access away?
Yes, at any time, from Admin → Users. Their access is listed there separately from your own people's, labelled as the consultant's, and an owner here can end it. It is also deliberately invisible to your identity provider: if you use directory sync, it will never add or remove a consultant, so nobody gets removed by an automated process in the middle of an engagement, and nobody gets quietly added by one either.
Ending access revokes their membership and deletes their stored copy of the key. It cannot reach into a browser where somebody already unlocked it, which is true of removing any collaborator from any system that encrypts on the client.
What do our employees see?
The survey page names the consultancy on behalf of your company, above the questions, with both logos. We do not allow a consultant to run a survey under their brand alone: your people should be able to tell who is asking and who is running it. The page also explains, in plain language, what is and is not collected.
What if we want to keep using it?
Take over the subscription whenever you like, during the engagement or after it. Open Subscription and choose Take over billing, then pick a plan.
Nothing moves. Same workspace, same address, same surveys, same results, same people. The consultant's access continues until you end it, because an engagement usually outlives the invoice, and you end it when you are ready.
What if their licence lapses?
Your data is not deleted and you can still sign in. Paid features stop until this workspace has a subscription of its own, which you can start from the same page without asking them.