Recently, Quae, the voting app used to give Stevens students a way to vote on campus issues, released a statement announcing their new feature: Daily Polls! This new addition gives the public a new way to interact with their leaders and hopes to eventually give leaders a better insight into their community. A press release from Quae says the daily polls will potentially cover “current events, ask specific questions, or inquire about demographic information,” and this will “help administrators build a sample set for Quae’s soon-to-be-released analytics engine.”
The daily polls will function similarly to most daily features commonly seen on mobile apps, with new variations released each day and a streak that gets extended every time you come back. The press release also hinted at a reward system being implemented to give users more incentive to come back each day. Co-founder Sam Schmitt explains, “at Quae we believe people are owners of their data and that they should be rewarded for sharing it, that’s why we want to pay people for participating in analytics.” Chief Marketing Officer, Cris Sosa adds, “it’s a win-win for the people, they get rewarded for participating and their representatives learn more about what their community wants.” Any data that you give to Quae through the polls stays anonymous with the platform’s guarantee to never reveal your identity or sell personal information.
The Quae team hopes this new feature will have a positive impact on groups that use it such as the Stevens SGA, Hoboken City Council, and Hudson Dorms. Hudson Dorms, a non-Stevens housing option for students, specifically hopes to use this tool to better understand student needs and wants when looking for housing.
While many apps and social media platforms have started collecting analytics from users in order to better market products and increase profits, Quae has moved away from this trend by taking a more ethical approach, making data acquisition voluntary and using results to help community leaders instead of marketing agencies. One can only hope that more companies will follow suit and use data analysis and demographic information to improve the communities they serve instead of profit from them.
Members of the Stevens community are encouraged to download the Quae app and sign up with your Stevens email address so you can experience this new feature as well as participate in polls from The Stute that get published every week.
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