FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

At Democrasoft, we help any organization to better engage, identify, refine and react to important issues and ideas with their group population, including employees, shareholders, association or club members, customers and partners, using Collaborize as an online social collaboration, voting, and learning platform.

Our platform offers flexibility and reliability with enhanced self-service capabilities, including built-in wizards, to help get your community set up and operating quickly. Democrasoft ensures that you have the tools you need to achieve collaboration success easily and quickly.

What is Collaborize^®?

Collaborize is a unique way for people to connect, interact, identify, refine and react to important issues and ideas online. It's an online collaboration and voting platform that is easy to use, compelling and engaging to participate in. You can interact with community members at any time by introducing discussion and voting topics to better understand attitudes and perceptions, or collaborate on product, service and organization-related solutions.

Best of all, Collaborize is easy to setup, intuitive, and web-based. You don't need to download, install, or configure anything. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection. We take away the back-end headaches of system operations, maintenance, and security. Our hosted platform allows for rapid deployment with the proven scalability and reliability to support thousands of users without the added infrastructure cost.

How can Collaborize help us?

Collaborize makes it easy to “reach in” to internal groups to improve communication and decision making, engage participants to share, discuss, react to and even vote on important ideas and issues.

You can promote collaboration from different voices and points of view within your community to rate and refine the best ideas that rise to the top. Build loyalty and trust within your group by using their ideas to help shape your community and allow them to see the impact they have.

Collaborize allows you to “reach out” to external audiences to understand what they are looking for, what they’re preferences are, and what their opinions, behaviors or issues are related to your product or service. You can easily test concepts, policies and ideas to improve satisfaction, identify market opportunities and drive product innovation. Check out our Collaborize page for more details.

Who is Collaborize for?

Collaborize is for any organization, union, association, corporation, school board, teacher, club, or group that wants to collaborate in ways that are engaging, time-saving and cost effective. It's perfect for any group of people that has topics to discuss and decisions that need to be made.

Collaborize is for the benefit of group members, because it enables them to communicate, interact and share information to build trust and community ownership of decisions. Bottom line, Collaborize allows you to make better decisions and engage more people, more effectively, for less money!

Can I use Collaborize for any group size?

Definitely! Collaborize works great with groups as small as 10 members or students, or large enterprises with over 25,000 members.

How does it work?

Collaborize provides a community environment for your members, employees, customers, or partners to identify, rate, refine, and prioritize issues or ideas. Plus, it’s easy to participate! Find topics that interest you, comment and vote on issues, or ask questions and share ideas to create action plans that achieve quantifiable and measurable results quickly. Get started by following these 4 simple steps:

Step 1 – Find Topics that you care about

Members comment and/or vote on questions or topics that inspire them.

Step 2 – Ask a Question or post an idea to the group

Poll your group for their opinion on important issues that make a difference in your organization. Build trust and loyalty by empowering teams to work together through group participation. Engage your audience to share, discuss and react to important issues or ideas. Group members can initiate questions and suggest ideas or topics for consideration.

Step 3 – Comment and Vote on topics or ideas that interest you

Invite your group members to voice their opinion, share ideas, develop trust and increase productivity. Save time by quickly identifying hot issues that rise to the top based on group rating or validation.

Find out where people stand. Whether it’s your members or your customers, you can measure their reaction on important issues to solve critical challenges.

Step 4 – See Results that you helped to create

Results provide real-time visibility of group adoption, engagement, participation levels and overall opinion. Published results inform members and customers of actions taken or planned, based on their input. As an added benefit, many valuable tools and resources you'll need to put your plans into action are provided for your convenience.

How much does Collaborize cost?

Collaborize is available in three different versions:

- Collaborize Classroom™, a free online learning platform for teachers and schools

- Collaborize Workplace™, for unions, associations, churches, town halls and other organizations

- Collaborize NPO™, for non-profit organizations

Click on a link above to learn more about the Collaborize product that fits your needs.

What payment methods do you accept? Can you take purchase orders? Can you invoice me?

We currently accept Visa, Mastercard, and American Express for Collaborize Workplace and Collaborize NPO. Unfortunately, we are not able to generate invoices, or accept purchase orders at this time.

To sign up for your FREE Collaborize Classroom site, click here. (You will not need a credit card.)
To sign up for Collaborize NPO, click here.
To learn more about Collaborize Workplace, click here.

Can I customize Collaborize for my group?

Absolutely! There are several ways to customize your Collaborize site. From adding a custom logo and color theme to brand your site, to adding productivity widgets (or just for fun!), you can customize several areas of your Collaborize site to cater to your group or organization's needs.

Is our member information private?

We take online security very seriously. All your member data is 100% private and password-protected – nobody can access your member information without specific permission from the administrator. By default, only specific members you've invited can access your online community and they are required to sign in with a unique username and password.

What are the system requirements to use Collaborize?

Since Collaborize is hosted on our servers, there's nothing to install and no server requirements to worry about. However, a live internet connection is required (via a telephone connection, DSL, cable, or other connection type). A high-speed internet connection is recommended. We support the two most recent stable versions of the following browsers*:

Internet Explorer (currently version 8 and 9)
Firefox (currently version 6 and 7)
Chrome (currently version 13 and 14)
Safari (currently version 4 and 5)

*Collaborize does not support Internet Explorer 6.x on the Mac or PC. If you have IE 6, we recommend switching to Firefox.

What if I have a support question?

The Democrasoft Technical Support team is committed to providing our customers with exceptional service. To back up that commitment, we have formal escalation and response time guidelines to ensure that we can best respond to your needs.

If you’re a registered Collaborize user, you can receive assistance from our support team via email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we'll get back to you right away.

What languages is Collaborize available in?

Currently, Collaborize is only available in English.