A complete consultation and surveys platform, built for the way UK government delivers services.
Request a demoFor UK public sector
SurveyOptic is the surveys, consultations and stakeholder feedback platform used across government, the NHS, regulators and arm's length bodies. A fully featured platform backed by the expert SocialOptic delivery team that plugs into the GOV.UK common platforms.
If you're a service owner, digital lead or commercial buyer searching for a survey or consultation platform that works with GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay and is delivered in the GOV.UK Design System — you're in the right place.
How to buyGOV.UK Notify — built in.
SurveyOptic sends every invitation, reminder and response notification through GOV.UK Notify when you want it to. That means emails, text messages and physical letters all go out through the same platform GDS built for the public sector, with the deliverability, branding and accessibility public servants already trust.
What this gives you:
- Emails, SMS and letters from one workflow. Run a consultation, send an email invite to your stakeholder list, follow up non-responders by SMS, and post a letter to anyone you couldn't reach digitally — all from the same SurveyOptic project, all through Notify.
- Your service's existing Notify account. SurveyOptic uses your organisation's Notify API key, so messages go out under your service name, with your templates, your branding and your reply-to address. Nothing is sent through a third-party sender domain.
- The deliverability and audit trail GDS provides. Delivery receipts, bounce handling, opt-outs and the Notify dashboard work exactly as they do for any other service using Notify.
- No SMS surcharges from us. Texts cost what Notify charges, not what a commercial vendor marks them up to.
Many survey platforms route SMS through commercial bulk-SMS providers, which means a different sender ID, a different cost model, and a different conversation with your information governance team. Going through Notify removes all of that.
GOV.UK Pay — built in.
For paid consultations, application fees, licence renewals and any service where someone needs to pay you before, during or after completing a form, SurveyOptic integrates directly with GOV.UK Pay.
What this gives you:
- PCI DSS compliant payments without procuring a PSP. GOV.UK Pay handles the payment service provider relationship — Adyen for local authorities, police and other non-Crown bodies, and Worldpay via Government Banking for central government, ALBs and the NHS. You don't need a separate merchant agreement, and you don't need a procurement.
- Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, MOTO and recurring payments. Everything GOV.UK Pay supports, SurveyOptic supports.
- The user journey people already know. Respondents see the hosted GOV.UK Pay payment page they've seen on dozens of other government services. That familiarity is worth real conversion percentage points.
- Reconciliation that works for finance teams. Payment IDs are stored against responses, so reconciliation back to your finance or ERP system is straightforward.
Pay matters most for paid consultations where there's a statutory fee for a formal response, application-fee-plus-feedback workflows, regulatory submissions, and any assessment where a small fee filters out non-serious respondents. If your service team has been told to use GOV.UK Pay and you also need structured responses, SurveyOptic is the no-code path that doesn't require you to build a bespoke form.
GOV.UK Design System — accessible by design.
SurveyOptic surveys and consultations can be styled to follow the GOV.UK Design System, so respondents get the look, feel and accessibility behaviour they expect from a government service. Your end-users don't have to learn a new pattern. Your accessibility team doesn't have to re-test against WCAG 2.2 AA from scratch.
This goes beyond just the visual appearance. The Design System is the codified output of years of user research with clear error summaries, consistent form field patterns, predictable navigation. Building on top of that work means your form, consultation or survey inherits a tested, accessible interaction model rather than starting from an enterprise SaaS aesthetic.
SocialOptic has been delivering accessible consultations and surveys for UK public sector since 2009. Accessibility is built in as a design requirement on every implementation, including work with recognised experts on accessibility testing. The platform is built and tested to meet WCAG 2.2 AA, giving your accessibility statement a strong, well-tested starting point.
More than a form builder — a complete consultation and surveys platform.
Form-builder products solve a specific problem: collecting structured data through a single online journey. That's useful for simple transactional services. It's not the same job as running a stakeholder survey, a statutory consultation, a 360-degree assessment, a service flow or a longitudinal engagement programme.
SurveyOptic is the next layer up. You get:
- The full lifecycle, not just the form. Cohort definition and sampling, invitation and reminder logic, response capture, response weighting, analysis, reporting, dashboards, action tracking — all on one platform.
- Question types form-builders don't have. Advanced structured question types, dynamic prompt and hint text, conditional branching and adaptive question presentation, multi-language support, accessibility-tested complex question types.
- Statistical reporting, benchmarking and trend analysis. Run a survey once and compare it to baseline data. Overlay your results against a relevant benchmark, track representativeness. Generate 150+ tailored reports per cycle for different audiences, automatically.
- Consultation-grade response handling. Anonymity thresholds, free-text analysis, response weighting, stakeholder segmentation, and the audit trail you need for a statutory consultation.
- A delivery team behind the platform. SocialOptic has been standing up survey and consultation programmes for central government, the NHS and regulators since 2009, delivering the exacting service standards required to deliver successful outcomes.
A form-builder will collect responses. SurveyOptic helps you understand them, act on them, and evidence what you did.
Why a survey platform built for the common GOV.UK platforms matters.
The Government as a Platform approach is straightforward: solve common problems once at the centre so service teams can focus on what's unique to their service. Notify solved messaging. Pay solved payments. The Design System solved interaction patterns and accessibility. One Login is solving identity.
What's missing in most procurements is a feedback, survey and consultation platform that joins those dots — that uses Notify to invite respondents, Pay to take any fees, and the Design System to render the experience. Enterprise survey platforms are useful for a corporate, but not designed for a Government department or an NHS trust.
SurveyOptic is built for the GDS common platforms. That's the difference.
Who's already using it.
SurveyOptic is used by central government departments, NHS trusts and providers, regulators, ALBs and devolved administrations, including:
- A central government arm's length bodysurveyed since the organisation's formation, with consistently high completion rates.
- A health and care regulatorA multi-year programme of stakeholder and experience surveys.
- A national regulatorSince 2020, with a growing number of self-service users, and dozens of public consultations.
- A central government departmentRuns its statutory public consultations on SurveyOptic.
- An independent healthcare providerStaff experience surveys across a large, multi-site workforce.
Government teams keep renewing with SurveyOptic.
Procurement — three compliant routes to buy.
Government Commercial Agency G-Cloud (Digital Marketplace).
SurveyOptic is available via the Government Commercial Agency (GCA, formerly Crown Commercial Service) G-Cloud framework (RM1557.14) on the Digital Marketplace. G-Cloud is the standard route for UK public sector cloud software procurement — direct award is permitted, no full competitive tender required, suppliers are pre-vetted, and standard call-off terms apply. If you're a central government department, ALB, NHS trust, local authority, devolved administration, university, school or blue-light service, G-Cloud is the fastest compliant route to buy.
NHS Shared Business Services.
SocialOptic is a named supplier on the NHS Shared Business Services Patient/Citizen Communication, Engagement and Hybrid Mail Solutions framework (SBS10521). For NHS trusts and integrated care boards, this is often the most straightforward route to purchase. SocialOptic has a long history of working with NHS teams and completes the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit.
Below-threshold direct procurement under the Procurement Act 2023.
For lower-value requirements, public bodies can buy SurveyOptic directly under their own procurement rules. The Procurement Act 2023 sets clearer below-threshold rules — the notifiable threshold is £12,000 including VAT for central government and £30,000 including VAT for sub-central authorities such as local government. We can support your procurement team with the standard supplier information, security pack and pricing breakdown.
Already gone to tender? We respond to formal ITTs, RFPs and tender exercises on Find a Tender Service. We're SME-sized, UK-based, and we win on substance rather than on the size of our bid team.
Security, compliance and governance — what your DPO and IG team will ask about.
| Certifications | ISO 27001, ISO 9001, Cyber Essentials Plus |
|---|---|
| Frameworks | G-Cloud via GCA (formerly CCS), NHS SBS Patient/Citizen Communication & Engagement |
| Data residency | UK-hosted, UK-processed — no data leaves the UK |
| Data protection | UK GDPR and DPA 2018 (as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025), with structured privacy notice review checklists |
| NHS | NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit completed by SocialOptic |
| Accessibility | WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, with accessibility built in from design |
| Business continuity | UK-resident incident response, full audit logging, role-based access control |
| Subprocessors | UK-based, documented, available on request |
| Company | SocialOptic Ltd, registered in England and Wales (Company No. 6990426), trading since 2009 |
A full security and compliance pack — covering certifications, subprocessor list, data flow diagrams, DPIA template, business continuity plan and the answers to the questions your IG team is about to ask — is available on request.
What you get with SurveyOptic.
This is not "buy the software, work out the rest yourself". With SocialOptic you get:
- The SurveyOptic platform, hosted in the UK, fully maintained, with the integrations described above.
- A named SocialOptic contact through implementation and into business-as-usual operation.
- Expert support from a team that's been doing this since 2009 — across central government, NHS, regulators, higher education and further education. We've stood up consultations, staff surveys, stakeholder programmes and patient experience work end-to-end, and we know what good looks like.
- Implementation tailored to your service context — not just turning on a SaaS tenant. Question design support, sampling advice, accessibility review, reporting design, and rendering built with the GOV.UK Design System.
- Optional fully managed delivery — from light-touch product support through to fully managed end-to-end consultations where we run the programme on your behalf.
That last point matters. Most enterprise SaaS vendors give you a login and a help desk. SocialOptic gives you the platform and the people who know how to use it in a UK public sector context.
Common questions.
Does SurveyOptic integrate with GOV.UK Notify?
Yes. SurveyOptic uses your organisation's GOV.UK Notify account to send invitations, reminders and notifications by email, SMS and letter — under your service name, with your templates and reply-to addresses.
Does SurveyOptic integrate with GOV.UK Pay?
Yes. SurveyOptic takes payments for paid consultations, application fees and licensing through GOV.UK Pay, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, MOTO and recurring payments, with full reconciliation back to responses.
Is SurveyOptic compliant with the GOV.UK Design System?
SurveyOptic surveys and consultations can be styled to follow GOV.UK Design System patterns and meet WCAG 2.2 AA.
Can we buy SurveyOptic via G-Cloud?
Yes. SurveyOptic is available via the G-Cloud framework — run by the Government Commercial Agency (GCA, formerly Crown Commercial Service) — on the Digital Marketplace. Direct award is permitted, with standard call-off terms.
How is SurveyOptic different from GOV.UK Forms or a form builder?
Form-builders collect structured data through a single online journey. SurveyOptic is the next layer up: cohort sampling, invitation logic, response weighting, statistical analysis, benchmarking, anonymity thresholds, dashboards, action tracking, and consultation-grade audit trails. Plus the SocialOptic team standing up the programme with you.
Where is SurveyOptic data hosted?
UK only. Data is processed and stored in the UK, with UK-based subprocessors only.
Can SurveyOptic use our existing GOV.UK Notify account?
Yes. We use your own Notify API key, so all messages are sent under your service's identity, with your branding and templates.
What's the implementation timeline?
For a standard staff survey or consultation deployment, weeks rather than months. Procurement via G-Cloud removes the longest pole in the tent. The SocialOptic team has the implementation pattern down from over a decade of public sector work.
Ready to see it?
Request a demo — we'll walk you through a live consultation or staff survey running on Notify and Pay, show you the accessibility behaviour of a Design System-styled form, and answer any procurement questions your commercial team has.
Request a demo