Use the Visibility settings to restrict project access to groups of people. You can choose who can view and participate in each project, allowing you to simultaneously run private consultations with a community panel and broader public campaigns.

You'll need to create the relevant participant groups and the project to restrict project access. You can still add Panelled and Protected projects to your homepage, but they will be inaccessible to those without access. Additionally, participant groups are not notified when they are added to a Panelled or Protected project; you may need to inform them and provide a URL for the project.

There are three visibility types; Public, Panelled, and Protected.

Public Visibility allows all community members to view and participate in projects. There are no restrictions on visibility, but you can still change your participation settings on your tools.

For example, you may have a publicly accessible project so all participants can learn about it but still restrict participation in a survey to registered users only.

Panelled Visibility allows viewing access to everyone, but only predetermined users can participate. When you select Panelled, a field will appear for you to specify which participant groups have participation access to the project. You may choose to use groups such as:

The public can’t view Protected projects, and they are only accessible to your chosen users. The participant group you select here are the only users who can interact with the consultation. You may want to use this to restrict to:

Although the public cannot access Protected projects, there is nothing to prevent users with access from downloading, saving, and sharing content, such as text, images, videos, or documents. This also applies to content uploaded by participants.