Five reasons not to build your own anonymous reporting platform

So you may have identified that there is a real need for an anonymous reporting platform within your institution or organisation, which is a great first step to reducing the barriers to reporting. Especially if your own people expressed desire for one. An anonymous reporting platform can help you listen to and support your people, analyse patterns and activate positive and lasting change. But you’re now faced with an important choice. Build it yourself or buy off-the-shelf?

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Why should you choose Culture Shift’s anonymous reporting platform?

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The temptation to build it yourself is understandable. But naturally, we don’t believe that is the right decision. Here, we break down five reasons why our anonymous reporting platform can save you time, money, energy and frustration.

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1. Ours is more cost-effective

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Occasionally, organisations opt to build their own ‘reporting form’ through Google Forms or something similar. This isn’t great for a number of reasons, including the confusing user interface, security risks, reduced usability across multiple devices, and lack of detailed analytics, so we wouldn’t recommend it as a suitable solution to tackling bullying, discrimination, harassment or unacceptable behaviour in your organisation.

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If you decided to build something of equal quality and capability of the Culture Shift platform, it would cost you much more than licensing our system. In fact we’ve calculated it would cost you upwards of £100,000 for the initial build, and a minimum of £120,000 to maintain over three years.

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Because our product is ‘off the shelf’ to you, we’ve already absorbed so much of the initial development costs, plus we started building it in 2018, so the version you see today has already had hundreds of thousands of pounds and millions of hours poured into making it the best system possible.

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You can get set up with Culture Shift from as little as £11,700* annually.

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Even our entry level package includes a user tested reporting process, an anonymous reporting option, a best practice set of questions and enterprise-level data security. Speak to the team for a quote bespoke to your organisation, based on number of potential users.

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2. We offer 365 day support and continuous improvement

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There is much more to developing a reporting platform than the upfront costs. We’re constantly evolving the system, getting feedback from our partners and users, and adding functionality and features to improve it and retain our reputation for being the best product on the market. If you think about how much work goes in to creating and maintaining your company website, that’s just a fraction of what goes into maintaining a reporting platform.

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Since we launched version two in July 2019, we’ve made upwards of 600 significant improvements. We’re constantly improving to meet user needs, and the risk is that if you don’t have a whole team dedicated to supporting and adapting your system, it will soon become unfit for purpose.

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3. Your data and those on your anonymous reporting platform will be a lot more secure

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If you want your data to be secure there are more ongoing costs that you’d have to plough into your system each year, including costs for technical maintenance, GDPR compliance and penetration testing. Security is hugely important to us and we spend a lot of time and resource making sure data is handled in the most secure way possible, including being ISO 27001 certified, which you can read more about here.

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Furthermore, the data of your users will remain secure too, which is often a question we are asked when it comes to how much of their information will be available. We cannot access your reports and the amount of information or data they disclose in reports is entirely up to them.

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4. You’ll be part of our extended community of Culture Shifters

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The Culture Shift offering is much more than just our reporting platform. We provide bespoke consultancy and training to ensure you’re set up for success, and are in the best possible place to understand all the data you receive and can use it to drive change. Our newly revolutionised analytics dashboard also helps you do this on a more regular basis, and this would be extremely difficult to replicate within your own solution. Organisations that partner with us also become part of the

extended ‘Culture Shift family’ with invitations to exclusive webinars, our monthly Community of Practice drop-ins and quarterly in person get togethers, as well as our annual Knowledge Forum.

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5. We are in line with regulatory compliance

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We constantly keep up to date with latest legislative requirements and help you meet those through our solution, something you might find you don’t have the time to do.

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In 2020, the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) released guidance on tackling harassment in the workplace, and they’re now using their powers to enforce legally binding Section 23 agreements on large employers.

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In a recent case the Royal Mail paid out damages of nearly a quarter of a million pounds to an employee because they had not done enough to protect him from being racially harassed at work. In this example, if Royal Mail were using Culture Shift, they may have either entirely prevented the incident from happening, or at least been able to demonstrate they were taking reasonable steps to protect staff by offering our platform and avoided the pay out.

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And our platform not only allows users to report incidences so-called “low levels” of bullying, discrimination and harassment, but can also be used for whistleblowing.

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We believe our expertise on these issues is priceless!

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*Costs for our product and service are based on the size of your organisation or institution, therefore costs reflected here may not be accurate for you. To get an accurate quote, and understand how you can benefit from using out reporting platform, please contact a member of our team using the link above.