For HR & internal comms
Employee surveys people are willing to answer honestly
Anonymous pulse checks, onboarding feedback and annual engagement surveys — with retention rules, access control and the option to keep every answer on your own infrastructure.
Ask for a name
Off by default — a pulse check does not need one.
Ask for an email
Only needed if you send a receipt.
Require an access code
Limits who can respond — without identifying them.
Stored per response
{
"answers": [ … ],
"submittedAt": "2026-07-28"
}The access code decides who may answer. It is not stored on the response.
Anonymity that is structural, not promised
An employee survey is only as good as the belief that answers cannot be traced back. Name capture is optional per survey, so a pulse check can collect nothing that identifies a respondent. What you get back is a distribution of opinion rather than a list of who said what — which is the only version anyone answers honestly.
Where you do need to control participation without identifying people, access codes gate who can respond without attaching a name to the response itself. It is the difference between knowing that only your team could answer and knowing which of them did.
Optional name capture
Collect a name only when you genuinely need one.
Access codes
Restrict who can respond without identifying them.
Retention rules
Answers delete or anonymise themselves on a schedule.
Surveys that fit how an organisation actually works
Conditional logic keeps a survey that must cover several departments from feeling like several surveys. Everyone answers the shared questions; the follow-ups branch by team, role or by an earlier answer, and nobody wades through sections that do not apply to them.
Long forms benefit from drafts: someone can start an engagement survey before a meeting, leave it, and come back to it later without losing what they wrote. Rating grids compress a page of near-identical agreement statements into one compact block, which does more for completion rates than any reminder email.
- Follow-ups branch by team or role — nobody wades through sections that do not apply.
- Drafts let someone start before a meeting and finish after it.
- Rating grids compress a page of agreement statements into one block.
Only respondents who match both conditions see it.
What the works council and the DPO will ask
Two questions come up every time: where does this data live, and when does it go away. Jackpoll is EU-hosted, and per-survey retention rules delete or anonymise responses automatically after a window you set, so an old engagement survey does not sit around indefinitely because nobody remembered it.
If the answer has to be "on our own servers", the whole application is open source and runs under Docker on your infrastructure. Data-subject requests are handled properly either way, with a complete machine-readable export and erasure across every table.
EU-hosted or self-hosted
Choose where the answers are processed.
Data-subject rights
Machine-readable export and full erasure, built in.
No per-seat licence
Survey ten people or ten thousand at the same cost.
Responses older than this are removed automatically by a daily job. Leave empty to keep them indefinitely.
Anonymise instead of delete
Keeps the statistics, drops anything identifying.
After 90 days, responses stay as anonymous statistics.
Frequently asked questions
- Can employee surveys be fully anonymous?
- Yes. Name capture is optional, so a survey can collect no identifying information at all while still using access codes to limit who may respond.
- How long are responses kept?
- As long as you choose. Each survey can carry a retention window, after which responses are automatically deleted or anonymised.
- Can we run it inside our own network?
- Yes. Jackpoll is open source and ships as Docker images, so it can run entirely on your own infrastructure with no licence fee.
Keep reading
Related pages on the same topic.
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