Deleting response data

You may find yourself in a situation where you need to delete some of your response data.

Citizen Space allows you to:

Delete an activity and all of its response data. This is permanent.
Delete an answer component and all of its response data, such as all email addresses from an activity - see more details below in Scenario 1. This also permanent.

In addition on your behalf, Delib can:

Delete part or all of an individual's response - see more details below in Scenario 2. This is permanent and cannot be undone.

Scenario 1

You need to delete the response data belonging to a particular field in a survey (such as to remove personal data)

Some organisations have a policy of deleting all of the personal data from a consultation after it's been stored and processed for a certain period of time, for example 2 years. In this scenario, you can delete the data you need to by deleting the answer components in which that data was collected.

On the dashboard, retract the consultation by selecting the dropdown arrow on the green 'Published' button and using the red 'Retract' button. (You need to temporarily retract the consultation from the public view to be able to edit the online survey part).
You'll need to carry out an additional step here if you use Citizen Space's response publishing feature and may have published responses displaying data that you're planning to delete (such as name or organisation) on the published response tiles. See article on how to customise the tile excerpts. If you don't use response publishing or haven't published responses on this consultation, continue to Step 3.
On the activity's navigation bar, go to the dropdown menu Design and build and select 'Build activity'. Use the left-hand sidebar menu to navigate to the question that was asking for personal data.
Select the question and then find the answer component in which the personal data was collected and select the 'Delete' button above that component.
Citizen Space will display a warning to let you know you're deleting a component that contains response data and that this action cannot be undone. If you're confident that you want this data to be permanently deleted, select the red 'Delete' button.
Remember to re-publish your consultation using the dropdown on the blue 'Draft' button on the dashboard, so that it reappears on your hub.

Scenario 2

You need to delete one or more individual responses

Citizen Space allows you to remove individual responses from your dataset and stop them being processed, but it doesn't give you the ability to permanently delete an individual response. This is by design to protect against mistakes resulting in data loss and to defend against any real or perceived risk of tampering with individual responses.

However, if a respondent requests for their data to be deleted or 'forgotten', Delib has the power to permanently erase part or all of an individual response on your behalf if you send us a clear written instruction. In that scenario please move the response in question to 'Removed responses' and then contact us via support@delib.net, letting us know which activity it is and the relevant details about the response you need removed.