Frequently asked questions
(FAQs)

When dealing with any sort of data, a spreadsheet is usually a good place to start, but rarely a good place to finish.

This is especially true of stakeholder engagement, because you have to contend with a variety of factors and requirements that spreadsheets simply can’t accommodate.

No. Definitely not.

There’s some overlap, for sure, but Darzin is, without doubt, a much bigger and more specialised solution than your typical CRM.

• Keep your stakeholder data always up to date – Keep their details up to date, and share relevant information between team members.
• See who’s involved & all relationships – See all the people you deal with at a stakeholder organization, and everything anyone from your team is doing with them, or saying to them, all on one page. Even if someone has changed jobs.
• Focus on your most important stakeholders – Segment your stakeholders based on their level of influence, interest and impact. Then you can easily see who’s most important, and how well you’re engaging with them.
• Get instant insight into critical issues – Easily plan where to focus your efforts. Darzin combines qualitative, quantitative and spatial analysis to reveal common themes, and areas of agreement or dissent.
• Know whose properties are impacted & how – Treat affected properties as stakeholders, so you can quickly track related stakeholder relationships, interactions, tasks and history.
• Track any other info you want – Create your own custom fields, and track whatever information is uniquely important to you and your stakeholders.
• Plan events & meetings – Keep all your key activities perfectly coordinated and properly paced, with a shared team calendar.
• Manage tasks & grievances – Stay on top of follow-up tasks and formal grievances with automatic notifications and response time tracking.
• Automatically save emails to Darzin – Simply add the Outlook or Gmail plugin, and all your emails will automatically save to the appropriate contact in Darzin. And if the contact isn’t there yet, Darzin will create it.
• Track online and in-person interactions – See every interaction, regardless of where it happened. Email, survey, meeting minutes or media, you can see every stakeholder communication, all in the one place.
• Create surveys & publish them on your site – Need an easy way to collect detailed feedback? Create a survey in Darzin and publish it on your website. Answers go directly to Darzin and are automatically matched to existing stakeholders.
• Easy media analysis – Use Darzin’s qualitative analysis function to get deeper insight into stakeholder views about specific issues. Works for both traditional media and social media. 
• See how your stakeholders actually feel – Darzin uses powerful artificial intelligence (AI) to objectively estimate the sentiment of all your interactions, free from human bias and preconceptions. So you can see what engagement methods your stakeholders prefer, and how they actually feel about specific issues.
• Out of the office? Just use the app! – With the Darzin mobile app for iOS and Android, you can stay abreast of all the important updates and make quick notes about conversations with stakeholders, even when you’re out of the office.
• See where people who raise issues are – Drill down on issues to see on a map where the people who raised them are located.
• Microsoft Excel import / export – At any time, you can import existing spreadsheets into Darzin, or export Darzin’s search results and reports to Excel spreadsheets.
• Report across multiple projects – If you have multiple operations or projects, you can report on an individual project, all projects within an area (e.g. a country) or all projects across your entire organization. So you can stay on top of engagement activities, key relationships and issues management, no matter where they’re happening in your organization.
• See comments made on an issue – There’s nothing like seeing a direct quote on an issue, in the stakeholder’s own words, to understand the context and full meaning of the issue.
• No more data silos – With Darzin, you can track issues across virtually any channel, from meeting minutes to surveys, emails to mass media.
• Drill right down – Want to understand what a particular group of stakeholders says about an issue? Or see Facebook comments about it? Or comments made in a workshop? With Darzin’s precise filters, you can quickly and easily slice-and-dice your data for incredibly granular insights.
• Filter out the noise – Want to see the comments on energy policy but not those related to climate change? Easy! Use Boolean searches to look for subsets in your data.
• No need for your IT team to help – Darzin is an easy-to-use, online solution. Plus we help you plan and set up your project, and provide comprehensive support once you’re up and running.

Yes. You can upgrade your license at any time. And if you upgrade before your original plan expires, we’ll credit the balance of your original license to your new license, so you don’t lose anything.

We have servers in a number of different locations, including Australia, the UK, EU and the US. (If you’re located elsewhere, talk to us about local hosting in your region.) 

Alternatively, you can host your data on your own servers, as part of a self-hosted plan.

You do. You own and control all your data at all times. We make it easy for you to export it out of Darzin at any time, and we’ll help you do so if you need assistance.

Darzin Software follows an information security management system (ISMS) as outlined in ISO27001, and we comply with the Privacy Legislation and Data Protection Act, which mandates the use of firewalls, and secure data storage and encryption, and prohibits the use of any information in your database.

Yes. All our staff sign agreements that bind them to strict confidentiality, and we never use your data for any purpose other than supporting you.

See our privacy policy for more information.

We’d be sad to see you go, but it’s entirely your decision, and we’ll help make it a seamless transition for you. You can export your data yourself or we can help you transition your data out of Darzin and into your new system.

Onboarding can be completed in as little as a day, but usually takes 3-6 weeks, depending on the size of your team and their availability. At the start of the onboarding process, we work with you to identify your preferred timeframes and milestones, and create a project plan to ensure we get there on time.

While we don’t provide 24/7 support, across the team, there’s usually someone available at most hours. In-app chat is the fastest way to access support, as your request will go straight to whoever is online at that time.

A user is any person with their own active, dedicated login to Darzin. 

Sending bulk email via our email plug-in means there are no additional costs to send emails. If you use the text message service (SMS), you’ll need to purchase credits from a third party provider and have your account linked to Darzin. If you integrate Darzin with other systems, you may need to purchase licenses for those systems too.

Yes. You probably won’t need to though. Our record limits are very generous and ideally balanced for the size of your team (this is one of the reasons why our license tiers are based on your number of users). In fact, in the last 10 years, only two Darzin clients have needed to increase their record limits.

A record is a stakeholder, property, or interaction.

Yes. Or if you prefer, we can send you an invoice for an electronic bank transfer (EFT).

Your Darzin license allows you to have multiple projects. Most licenses (apart from the Starter license) allow for unlimited projects.

Setting up your teams or work areas into separate projects allows you to give each team a very customized view of your data, and enables you to streamline everyone’s day-to-day work processes. Each team sees only the data that’s relevant to their area of work or project, without the noise of any irrelevant data. You can also quarantine some information from wider access (e.g. give only certain staff or teams access to confidential data). 

‘Data’ means anything from a stakeholder’s name or phone number, to your various filters, settings, interactions and more.

This means you can easily share information between various projects, rather than creating a lot of duplicates. It also means you can report (and share reports) across multiple projects to track progress across your organization.

Darzin makes all of this easy and intuitive, with excellent granularity and control.

Setting up your account can be done within a few hours. But do allow time for the onboarding and training processes. On average most clients take three weeks to get their team trained, existing data imported and documentation in place.

At Darzin we pride ourselves on being a very responsive, service-oriented company. As part of your Darzin license, you get comprehensive, expert support. So you’re never alone. All licenses include hands-on onboarding support, ongoing proactive support from our customer success team, and responsive technical support through multiple channels including email, help desk, phone and web.

Learn more about our customer support

Yes. When purchasing a new license, you can prepay for the total length of your project, or just pay annually. 

It depends on your requirements. If you feel you need a different license, please contact us to discuss.

No. Onboarding support is provided to your entire team when you first sign up; it’s not provided ad-hoc when you add new users to your account later. They do, however, benefit from our other support channels and our help center, which includes how-to videos on all features. Some clients purchase additional training hours to be used over the year as and when new team members join. We keep track of the hours and it’s easy for your users to request additional personalized training when they need it.

Learn more about our customer support