- Civey is Germany’s largest polling institute.
- More than 5 million registered and 300,000 active users.
- Civey is designed to build trust and create transparency.
In the time of fake news and vulgar opinions on the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to collect honest user opinions. The founder of Civey saw the need for a tool that helps companies make better decision and gives individuals a chance to express their standpoint.
Instead of just guessing what the customer wants, the Berlin-based startup introduced a tool that allows any online medium to ask their readers what they really think. For a small fee, online media are able to collect opinions and immediately generate representative results from their own readers.
How it Works
Any online media outlet can embed the Civey survey tool into its own website to increase the engagement and to get in contact with its users. When reading an article, readers can directly answer questions and express their opinions in the survey directly on the website. And what do they get in return?
The Civey’s business model is based on a data trade. The participants do not receive financial return, instead, they can see the results of the polls in real time. The more the users participate, the more weight their answers have in the calculation. In the background, the tool creates a database that automatically searches for correlations with other surveys.
Since various media have different and sometimes very small target groups, the database should also help to weight the results better. This solution offers a novel approach to collecting and processing real-time information about people’s opinions. Readers will no longer be influenced by misleading comments, but will be able to get reliable results directly on any given topic.
How it All Started
All the founders have extensive experience from working in ministries, lobbying companies communication agencies or universities. They all realized how difficult and expensive it is to get reliable data. Pollsters often have a hard time to get an honest opinion from people, who in return, get nothing.
The team chose an alternative approach – they show the participant the results in real-time. Because of that, people are participating more frequently which enlarges the sample size.
Janina Mütze, the co-founder of Civey, explained us that instead of offering participants money the tool is built on trust and transparency. With over 5 million registered and 300,000 active users, Civey is the Germany’s largest online platform for opinion data. However, they do not stop there. Civey raised in total 7 million euros in funding and is currently aiming to expand abroad starting with the US by the end of 2018.