New capability makes it easy to collect forecasts from wider audiences

By Faith Powell on July 11, 2023

Cultivate has released a new “request for response” capability that allows you to send any audience a simple survey, in which they can submit forecasts that will automatically get aggregated with your crowd’s on your Forecasts platform.

Typically, in order to submit forecasts, people need to sign in and navigate to a list of questions on the forecasting site. While this works for a core group of users, it can be a challenge for senior leaders or other audiences to create an account and go through this login process repeatedly.

Now, you can send a link to anyone (whether they are a user or not on your forecasting site) to complete a one-time survey, where it will walk them through a set of forecast questions you assign to them. The forecasting interface within the survey looks the same as on the forecasting site, asking participants for probabilistic forecasts and rationales. Forecasts collected through the survey are anonymized and aggregated directly with the crowd forecast.

On the backend, when participants respond to the survey, a user account will be automatically created for them if they don’t already have one. This allows their forecasts to be registered next to other forecasts on the site, and gives them the option to come back later and update forecasts if they can.

For analysis purposes, any email distribution list you create as part of the “request for response” feature, will be stored as a cohort that you can then compare to other cohorts or the general crowd on your forecasting site. For example, you could send a survey to organizational senior leaders and immediately benchmark their aggregate forecast against the crowd’s.

How can you use this new feature? The “request for response” is a great option for collecting insights from senior executives, attendees at events or meetings, and other unique audiences who may not easily be able to access a forecasting site. You can share the survey link on social media or other channels, so it’s also a great tool to draw forecasts from wider audiences.

We’re always looking for ways to make engagement easier. This can be a powerful tool for you to capture audiences you might not otherwise be able to – ultimately helping to grow collective wisdom, reduce risk, and improve decision making. 

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Want to try out this capability? Take this brief survey to forecast on one question about the Russia/Ukraine conflict, then give us feedback on the process. Your forecast will automatically contribute to INFER, a crowdsourced forecasting platform supporting the U.S. Government.

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