What are benchmark hubs and how should I use them?

A Hub page allows you to present multiple Salary Confidential surveys and polls from a single page. Instead of sending invitees to one specific survey, you can send them to a Hub page and let them choose which pre-selected survey peer group best match their professional profile and respond.

Hub pages are especially useful for organizations such as professional associations, alumni groups, membership organizations, conference sponsors and industry communities. These high-affinity groups have a lot in common, and are natural peer groups, but the organization usually doesn't have highly granular information about every member's exact role, seniority, specialization, geography, or work model.

Rather than creating and maintaining separate invitation lists for every survey peer group, the organization can present the available options on one page and let invitees self-select.

Why Hub pages exist

Personal Salary Confidential surveys are usually built around a tightly defined peer group. The requester knows who they want to ask and invites those people directly. The result is a report that is very focused on narrow use cases -- and therefore, directly leverageable by all participants who gain access to the report.

Organization-sponsored programs often work differently. An association may know that someone is a member, but not whether they are a Director, Vice President, consultant, founder, freelancer, or executive. An alumni organization may know which program someone attended, but not where their career has taken them since.

A Hub page solves this by showing the survey peer groups that are available and allowing invitees to choose the one that fits.

The invitee is not simply choosing a form to fill out. They are identifying the peer group they belong to.

Hub pages group surveys and Polls

A Hub page is a presentation and administration layer. It displays individual surveys and offers a one-link based way to see everything the Organization has sponsored for its members.

A survey represents a specific peer group collecting responses. A Poll groups related survey peer groups that share a set of questions and can produce Poll-level roll-up reporting. (Think 'All physicians' at the poll level, and each survey peer group is a different kind of professional, like Cardiologists or Dermatologists) )

The Hub page does not replace either object. It simply gives participants a single destination where those surveys and Polls can be discovered.

One invitation, multiple survey options

Hub pages also make invitation administration easier.

Instead of sending separate invitations for each survey peer group, you can invite participants to the Hub page. Their invitation code can then be used according to the participation rules configured for that page.

For example, an organization may allow invitees to complete one survey from the Hub page. Another organization may allow invitees to complete more than one survey if several peer groups apply to them.

This is especially helpful when invitees may belong to more than one professional category, or when the organization does not want to manually decide which survey each person should receive.

Our cryptographic invitation tokens are uniquely crafted for privacy, while preventing surveys from getting overrun by outside participants. You can read more about them here TKTKT

Hub pages are only offered to organizations at the moment

We have chosen to only make hub pages available to organizations because there is not a strong case for them for personal users, who drive surveys with far more control over the peers they invite.

Get in touch with us if you think they'd be useful to you as an individual user.

What reports do participants receive?

If a survey is part of a benchmark hub, its respondents gain two reports instead of just one:

The survey's full report, as a participant
The benchmark report, granted by derived participating into any one of its surveys.

In details:

The 'give-to-get' model of Salary Confidential is always true regardless of whether a respondent accesses a survey through a hub page or by being invited directly into one specific survey (the approach for individual users).

In addition to the specific full reports of the survey peer group(s) they take part in, participants who were invited through a Hub page also receive access to a Hub-level highlights report, which shares highlights from every survey peer group available through the Hub page. This gives invitees a little taste across the whole membership -- but only the actual participants of a specific survey get access to its full report.

Note that if a respondent takes part in a survey that ends up not being able to close because it never reaches minimal safe size (4 participants), this respondent is still considered a participant of the benchmark and gains access to the Hub-level report. The respondent results code they got when they took part in their survey will be honored to gain access to the Hub-level report.

What reports does the sponsoring organization receive?

As the paying sponsor of the surveys in a Benchmark hub, sponsoring organizations

receive access to the full reports of every published survey report associated with their program.
if surveys are organized into Polls, the organization also receive Poll-level reporting that rolls up related survey peer groups. (Polls are groups of surveys where the survey peer groups are a facet of a larger topic. For example, you may have a Poll for Marketing employees, and each survey peer group is a different kind of marketer. Each survey peer group publishes a report -- and this is what respondents see because the survey peer group is the exposed contribution door, but the Poll level report rolls up and recalculates from the results across all its peer groups.)
finally, the sponsor organization also receives the Hub-level reporting that summarizes findings across the surveys and Polls presented through the Hub page, just like survey participants do.

Benchmark hub pages have two display options

An organization sponsoring a hub page can choose two display options:

Grouped by poll
Survey flat cards

The 'grouped by poll' option is what an organization would want when they have used the poll concept semantically. For example, the Acme organization which is sponsoring the Women in Data conference may create one poll for VPs, and within this poll creates 5 survey peer groups: New York, Bay Area, Southwest and Triangle, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest. The five survey peer groups are facets of the poll "VP and C suite", each group has its own form and publishes its own report (Read more about polls and surveys in SC, which is one of its unique functionality)

In this use case, it will help the Benchmark hub page to show the five surveys under their "For VPs" poll header. Only the sponsoring org, Acme, will see the full potential of the Poll -- which is the data rollup report a poll publishes with its children surveys -- but as an element of organization, the Poll is a thing that helps structure the layout of the surveys on the hub page. You can view a demo of a Benchmark hub page using the 'group by poll' display option

If a sponsor organization isn't leveraging the functionalities of our polls -- meaning all surveys across a whole different bunch of use cases are being grouped under one poll but the poll isn't 'meaningful' as an aggregate --, then you can choose the display option of "surveys as flat cards" where the existence of the Poll parent level is basically invisible. You can view a demo of a Benchmark hub page using the 'survey flat cards' display option