What’s the difference between confidentiality and anonymity in employee surveys?

When you’re asked to share feedback in a survey, it’s important to understand how your responses are handled. “Confidential” and “anonymous” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they mean very different things.

What does “anonymous” mean?

An anonymous survey means that no identifying information about you is collected or stored. Your email and other personal identifiers are not linked to your responses. Even administrators or analysts cannot trace your answers back to you. Because no identifiers exist, it’s impossible to integrate additional data, such as department, location, and manager to reliably and meaningfully organize results (e.g., sharing aggregated insights with managers based on their team’s feedback).

What does “confidential” mean?

A confidential survey means your responses can be linked to you within OrgAcuity’s system, but only authorized admins (e.g., OrgAcuity) can view or process that data — and they do so under strict privacy protections. Individual responses are never shared with managers or colleagues. Data are aggregated and de-identified before being reported (e.g., results shown only for groups of 5 or more). Confidentiality allows for more reliable and robust insights, while still safeguarding individual privacy.

It's also worth clarifying what "confidential" does not mean: it does not automatically mean that people within your organization can download or access raw survey responses tied to individuals. By default, that level of access is not enabled. A separate permission — called a raw data extract — must be explicitly configured by your organization's survey administrators if there is a specific business need for it (e.g., joining survey responses with other employee-level data). If a raw data extract has been enabled for your survey, you will see a notice on the survey landing page informing you of this before you begin.

Why does OrgAcuity use confidentiality instead of anonymity?

OrgAcuity’s mission is to help organizations understand patterns, relationships, and experiences while maintaining strict privacy standards. Confidentiality allows for richer insights, such as understanding differences across teams or tracking change over time, while ensuring that individuals remain protected through robust data safeguards and reporting thresholds. Confidential surveys have overwhelmingly become the standard approach organizations use to gather employee feedback.