Frequently Asked Questions

Welphi operates in rounds, similar to the standard Delphi method. However, unlike
the traditional Delphi, where feedback from one round is shared with participants
before the next round starts, Welphi shares the feedback from one round with the
participants during the next round. This allows participants to consider changing their
opinions while viewing the automatic statistics generated by Welphi and the
anonymous comments provided by other participants. 
By definition, since it is an online platform, you can call your process an e-Delphi.
Given the difference in how statistics are shared (among other changes), this is also a
modified Delphi. 
After each round, you just need to click the “Add new round button,” and Welphi will
automatically create a new round as a copy of the previous one, including aggregated
statistics from the participant’s answers. You can implement consensus rules to filter
questions already approved from showing up in the next round.

You just need to insert the list of criteria you want to weigh and, for each one, two
benchmark levels, enabling your participants to make proper comparisons. Based upon
this, Welphi will automatically build the necessary questions to be answered by your
participants. Based on the answers, welphi will return a set of weights for each
criterion and for each participant by implementing the MACBETH method

There are three types of questions in Welphi: Delphi-related, MCDA-related, and
regular questionnaire questions. Welphi automatically generates statistics for Delphi-
related questions and produces scores and weights for MCDA-related questions. On

the other hand, regular questionnaire questions are standard open-ended or closed-
ended questions that you can set up, but they will not be analyzed by the system.

Yes, you can set up any qualitative scale you can think of on a qualitative page.

Yes. Welphi will create automatic statistics for qualitative, quantitative, or ranking
questions. You can access this information anytime in your back office and decide
whether to make this analysis visible to your participants in the next round. 
When sharing the statistics with the participants, you can allow them to filter the
information based on some cluster. The cluster is automatically created based on
answers to particular questions. For example, if you have a question in your
questionnaire about the participant’s academic experience and one of the possible
answers is “PhD,” then the statistics for the qualitative pages can be filtered to show
information coming only from people who answered “PhD” previously.

On any plan, the first page participants will see after login is the welcome page, where
you can provide instructions. 
You can also add survey-type pages to your questionnaire where you can include texts
and images.

Welphi will do that for you! Welphi works by rounds, and any info collected in one
round will be shared with the participants in the next. This means you save time by
skipping the reporting in between rounds. Additionally, this will make participants’
jobs much easier since they will be able to see the stats and the comments at the same
time as they can provide a new answer for the current round.

Welphi works by rounds. Only when one round ends can you launch a new one where

your participants can see the statistics based on the previous round’s answers.
However, since Welphi creates all new rounds automatically as a copy of the previous
one, creating a similar setup as an RTD is straightforward. You just need to keep
creating new rounds so that when your participants return to the questionnaire, they
see updated statistics.

Yes, please get in touch with us for pricing.

Yes. You just need to upload a list of your participant’s e-mails, and Welphi will
generate a unique link for each participant. Additionally, you can use Welphi to send a
customizable invitation e-mail to your participants. You will then be able to keep track
of everything each participant does in the questionnaire and send reminder e-mails if
needed.

All data can be downloaded to Excel. Additionally, the list of participants and questions
on the qualitative page can be uploaded from a .csv file.

Welphi presents the statistics in rounded numbers to make them easier to analyze.
However, when doing calculations, the entire number is used. Of course, when
divisions end up with infinite decimal places, no rounding will add up to a hundred, so
it is expected that sometimes the sum is 101% or 99%. Because of this, the export
includes the raw data to decide what rounding, if any, you want to use in your reports.

There are several ways you can invite your panelists. The easiest way is to upload the
participants’ e-mail addresses list and use Welphi to send invitation e-mails. These e-
mails will automatically include unique participation links per participant. If you don’t
have a predefined list of participants, you can share a universal link on social networks,
websites, or any other way. Anyone can use the link and access the questionnaire (a
process sometimes called snowballing).  
Regardless of the invitation method, you can always keep track of each participant’s
progress. If you sent the invitation e-mails from within Welphi, you can also know

whether the participants received the e-mail, if they opened the e-mail, and if they
clicked the access links. Using the Welphi filters, you can easily send reminder e-mails
to only the participants who did not start or did not complete the questionnaire.

All data can be analyzed inside Welphi or downloaded into Excel files.

Yes, you can upload your data in more than one language. As for the platform’s native
texts (buttons, etc.), we currently support English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
and German, but any other language can easily be implemented.

Our software development team regularly performs internal vulnerability assessments
as part of our standard security protocols.  
There are no known open vulnerabilities that have not been addressed. Our security
process is designed to detect and promptly resolve potential vulnerabilities, ensuring
all our clients receive secure and well-maintained software. Should any vulnerabilities
be identified, they are prioritized and addressed immediately.

AWS provides its own firewall along with a malware detection system called
GuardDuty. GuardDuty continuously monitors for malicious activity by analyzing the
AWS environment to identify potential threats in real time.

Our application runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, which provides
advanced Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions. AWS follows best practices to ensure high
availability and rapid recovery in disasters. These strategies include data replication
across geographical regions (multi-region failover), automated snapshots, and
mechanisms for automated recovery. 
As for DR testing frequency, we rely on the regular tests performed by AWS to ensure
the integrity and continuity of the infrastructure services. Additionally, we conduct
continuous monitoring and maintain periodic backups, ensuring that recovery is swift
and efficient in case of any failure or disaster.

Your data is securely encrypted and saved in our database. The data is available while
you are a paying customer or until you choose to delete it. Once you decide to stop
using Welphi, the data will be kept for a period of 5 years, after which it will be
deleted.

No, Welphi doesn´t collect GPS data

The database remains encrypted at rest through Amazon RDS VPC security.
Additionally, we have implemented an "always encrypted" policy with AWS key
management services. Data in transit is encrypted using TLS 1.2.

Welphi is hosted with Amazon's AWS cloud services (server is based in Frankfurt)

Your personal data may be transferred outside the EEA. This happens, for example,
when we use service providers like e-mail service providers to help our business.
Currently, we are using Mailchimp to send invitation e-mails to participants, so some
of the data is transferred to the US.

Participants are required to agree to our privacy policy when first accessing a Welphi
study.

Both the admin and the participants in the questionnaire are required to have a
username and password. Both can remove their user from the system either by
directly accessing this option after logging in to the system or by sending an email to
our support address support@welphi.com.

Yes, both the admin and the participants in the questionnaire can remove or change
their user and all associated data from the system either by directly accessing this
option after logging in to the system or by sending an email to our support address.

Yes. Back-ups can only be accessed by restoring the data into a separate Welphi
solution where the data owner (the client) can access its data, as happens typically in
Welphi. Data will be deleted after 5 years of inactivity on the account.

There are two obvious ways to ask the opinion of a set of people: join everyone in a room or set up an online questionnaire. While we think the former will always be the best way to foster the debate and exchange of arguments between people, it lacks the flexibility required to join people often geographically disperse and with tight schedules. Additionally, it makes no sense when the number of participants is very high. The later, on the other way, overcomes the problems of having many people at the same time in a room but makes it impossible to share people’s opinions. This is where Welphi comes handy. It not only provides the online resources to set up a questionnaire where each participants can answer it his own pace and place, but it also makes it possible to share participants answers and comments and ultimately allow any participant to change his/her answer after getting feedback from his peers.

Yes. If you only set up 1 round and choose to not allow users to comment on their answers you will be setting a normal questionnaire just like any platform does.

Yes, whenever you create a new round  welphi will automatically copy all pages and questions as well as participants answers from the previous round. When the new round is launched, each participant will access the same pages but this time the previous rounds’ answers will be presented for each answer. Depending on the type of questions, this information may include, tables, charts and comments and will always remain anonymous.

Every time you want to get the answers from the participants you want to invite, you need to set up a round. A round begins when you invite participants, and ends when you decide you have enough answers. Once the first round is finished, you can use Welphi’s tools to analyse the data. After this, you can set up another round so that participants are allowed to see the statistics of the other users’s answers as well as the comments they may have written. The goal is that, through several rounds, the group can get closer to a consensus.

Welphi can be used to help someone get feedback from experts/participants regarding a particular subject where he/she requires a validation of some elements. These elements can be:

• 1 – Indicators to used in the construction of an index;
• 2 – Goals to be set for a department or company;
• 3 – Events or scenarios which likelihood you want to access;
• 4 – Criteria to used in the evaluation of drugs;
• 5 – Key performance Indicators for performance measure
• 6 – Places where you want to go next holydays.

Anything you can think of…

No. To help the questionnaire be cleaner to the participants, you can add category field to the elements to aggregate them in groups. Imagine you are asking validation about criteria to build an index, you can add a field named “Area” and define to each area does each criterion belong. This way, the questionnaire will be splitted in a screen for each area thus making it much easier for participants to answer.

Yes. You can access the round user’s statistics page to see the exact percentage of the questionnaire that any user has already completed. Please note that you cannot see the participant’s answers. Those will remain anonymous.

No.

No.

Yes. You can change add and remove participants at any time.