When I look back at the year’s achievements, it’s hard to believe that so much has happened in the space of 12 months. As the northern hemisphere air turns chilled, and homes welcome us in with the smells of Christmas spice and festive treats, indulge us for a moment as we look back on 2025.
SurveyOptic is always being updated and improved, but this year there has been an increased velocity, with a focus on helping people to communicate. That thread of communication and working together has been a theme across all of our work this year.
Visibility and Control
In the first instance, we’ve been adding more ways to communicate with survey respondents, ensuring they’re kept well informed, and that they feel safe and confident, with additional messages that cover each step of the survey life-cycle, including communicating with respondents before the survey has launched.
We have always made it easy to leave and return to a survey later, saving user’s progress, but we’ve enhanced this further still by giving users a page to get a unique link which they can take with them to return to, even on another device, and re-assuring them that their answers are saved and safe. Combined with our response review step, respondents are fully informed and in complete control of their response.
We’ve been adding more ways to communicate with platform users. Toast notifications (nothing to do with breakfast, toasts are those little pop-up things in the corner of your screen) now confirm actions such as email sends and survey archiving, with an ‘undo’ option at hand, just in case. Critical actions such as publishing and closing surveys have their own mini-wizards, reviewing the action and any messaging for survey respondents. Custom fields can be added to surveys for internal references such as ticket numbers, the project lead, as well as fields for the purpose and audience of the survey.
Branding and Visualisation
Communication isn’t just about additional content, it is also about presentation. The way information is presented can transform its impact on the viewer. That’s why we’ve also been working hard on improvements to visual representation. Our platform users will have noticed a fresh look and updated branding, with a modernised colour palette, making things clearer throughout the platform.
It’s not just our own branding we’ve been sharpening, we have also enhanced the branding support for customer themes, extending them to email communications, ensuring your brand is accurately represented in email communications as well as surveys. That includes our implementation of the Government Design System for our UK Government customers and use of the GOV.UK Notify service.
Understanding Experiences
The ultimate goal of any survey is to reveal insights that might otherwise remain hidden. This year, we brought our most advanced tools, like cluster analysis and key driver analysis, into our default reports. We also introduced many new features to better understand organisational structures and how experiences differ across them.
In sectors like Healthcare and Education, these tools are more than just features; they are capacity-builders. We’ve worked closely with customers and regulatory bodies to automate workflows that were previously slow and burdensome. By putting real-time data into the hands of clinicians and management, we are helping to amplify the lived experiences of service users, allowing organisations to react when it matters most.
Quality, Security and Trust
We know that data-driven decision-making relies on a foundation of trust. This year marked a major milestone as SocialOptic have achieved ISO27001 and ISO9001 certifications, covering our platform and professional services. This was a significant effort, with internal and external audits which are now part of our processes. The certifications recognise our ongoing commitment to cyber security and quality standards. They add to our existing certifications including Cyber Essentials Plus and National Data Guardian DPST Certification for healthcare data, and our new trust centre. We have also empowered customers with new data quality and security features to support their own compliance, with an extended data import wizard, and file sharing features that control who can access files and even automate data syncing for data such as staff lists.
Connecting through Community
When it comes to communication and working together, our passion goes beyond the projects we work on. Our public Webinars continued to be a highlight of 2025, open to anyone that wishes to join us and learn from our experiences, with new sessions tackling the challenges of Applying AI to surveys, and approaches to survey reporting. It has been great connecting with people and discussing the challenges people face in their own organisations. We have also re-run previous favourites, all of which can be found on our webinars page.
There is always more to say, but time is pressing and the presents won’t wrap themselves. We’ll leave the rest for 2026.
From all of us at SocialOptic, thank you for working with us this year.