Ascent — Bringing Surveys, ESG Insights & Reporting into One Platform
A Complete Online Survey & ESG Insights Platform Built for Ascent
Client Overview
Ascent approached Cyblance with a clear ambition: to own a dedicated, end-to-end online survey platform rather than depend on third-party tools stitched together for corporate research. The goal was to give researchers and business stakeholders a faster, more flexible, and effortless way to access business-critical information whether that meant running a quick internal pulse-check or a large-scale external stakeholder study.
Both high-value internal surveys (employee engagement, governance checks) and external surveys (customer sentiment, ESG disclosures, stakeholder consultations) needed to be designed and distributed from the same system, without friction between the two.
The Objective
The core objective was to design and build a self-owned survey solution that could:
- Give Ascent’s admin team complete control over survey creation, distribution, and reporting without relying on external SaaS survey tools.
- Support both structured corporate research (ESG, governance, compliance) and everyday feedback collection (employee, customer, stakeholder).
- Make survey participation simple and fast for end users, while giving Ascent’s own clients the ability to manage their respondent base independently.
- Turn raw survey responses into decision-ready reports that could be shared internally, with clients, or with stakeholders directly from the platform.
The Challenge
Corporate survey programs typically involve several disconnected moving parts a mailing tool for invitations, a spreadsheet for tracking stakeholders, a separate ESG checklist maintained by the sustainability team, and a generic form builder for the actual survey. This fragmentation slows research cycles down and makes it hard to maintain a consistent, auditable record of who was surveyed, when, and about what.
Cyblance’s task was to consolidate all of this into one Laravel-based platform, with a clear separation between what the admin (Ascent) controls centrally and what individual users (Ascent’s clients) can manage for their own respondent groups — while keeping the experience simple enough for non-technical stakeholders to use on both desktop and mobile.
Our Solution
Cyblance designed and delivered a two-sided platform an Admin Portal for Ascent’s internal team and a User Portal for clients and respondents built on Laravel and optimized for both desktop and responsive mobile use.
Admin Side Solutions
- Email Template Setup: Ascent’s admin team can configure and send branded email templates for survey invitations, user registration, and general corporate communication all from one place, instead of drafting emails manually for every campaign.
- User Management: A centralized dashboard gives the admin visibility into every user profile name, company, designation, and contact details with fast search, so surveys can be sent to individuals or in bulk without digging through spreadsheets.
- Stakeholders Management: Stakeholders are managed from their own dedicated dashboard, with editable profiles and built-in text-box support so stakeholders can submit real-time feedback rather than waiting for the next survey cycle.
- Creating and Managing ESG Aspects: A purpose-built portal lets the admin create, edit, or delete Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) aspects, and reuse them as a checklist when designing new surveys keeping ESG criteria consistent across every study.
- Survey Report Generation: Detailed survey reports can be generated for any month, year, industry, or stakeholder group, ready for internal review, client delivery, or marketing use removing the need to manually compile results after every survey closes.
- Create Custom Survey: Admins can build and store custom survey templates covering stakeholders, ESG aspects, or other focus areas such as Food, Safety, and Health, so future surveys can be assembled from proven question sets instead of starting from scratch.
- Profile Management: Role-based profile management lets privileged admins control access across other admins, stakeholders, users, and companies, keeping the platform secure as more teams start using it.
User Side Solutions
- Take Survey: End users can browse and select the surveys sent to them, respond to both subjective and objective questions, and reach out to the admin directly if they have questions — keeping participation friction-free.
- Survey Invitation Sent Functionality: Ascent’s clients can invite their own end users to a survey with a single click, removing the manual, one-by-one invitation process that typically slows research down.
- Survey Report Check: Users can view survey reports through graphical, easy-to-read depictions and forward them to relevant or all stakeholders. Reports can be filtered by month, year, or specific respondent demographics, making it easy to isolate the insights that matter.
- User Profile Management: Privileged users can manage the profiles of other users or end-users and assign specific privileges as needed, so client teams can self-serve their own user administration instead of routing every change through Ascent’s admin.
Outcomes
The delivered platform gave Ascent a single, self-owned home for its entire survey lifecycle from designing a question set and inviting respondents, to collecting responses and turning them into a shareable report. By separating admin-level controls (email templates, ESG aspect management, custom survey templates, cross-company reporting) from user-level controls (sending invitations, checking reports, managing their own respondents), the solution lets Ascent operate as a platform provider for its own clients rather than a single-tenant survey tool.
The dedicated ESG aspect management portal, in particular, positioned Ascent to run structured ESG and stakeholder research as a repeatable, checklist-driven process rather than a one-off project directly supporting the kind of high-value internal and external surveys the client set out to enable.
Industry Trends & Forward-Looking Context
The features above reflect what was scoped and delivered for Ascent. Separately, it’s worth noting how the broader online survey and ESG-research space has continued to evolve context that can inform where a platform like this could go next, rather than a description of what was built.
What this means going forward
None of these trends change what was delivered for Ascent’s platform — the case study above reflects the actual scope built. But they point to natural next steps worth considering in future phases: AI-assisted question generation and bias checks within the Create Custom Survey module, real-time/live report summaries alongside the existing monthly reporting, and deeper alignment of the ESG Aspects portal with recognized frameworks (GRI, SASB, ISSB) as stakeholder and regulatory expectations continue to rise.
Conclusion
By consolidating email communication, user and stakeholder management, ESG aspect tracking, custom survey creation, and reporting into one Laravel-based platform, Cyblance gave Ascent the foundation to run its own survey business rather than renting capacity on a generic third-party tool. The clear admin/user separation means Ascent can operate as a platform for its own clients, while the ESG-specific tooling gives it a genuine edge in a segment of the research market that is growing quickly and is increasingly shaped by regulation. The result is a flexible, effortless way for researchers to design, distribute, and act on both internal and external surveys exactly what Ascent set out to build.
