Culture Amp is a world-class tool for employee engagement. It was built to listen to your staff — not to the vulnerable clients those staff serve.
Culture Amp looks inward. Pulse For Good looks outward — toward the people whose lives your services affect.
| Pulse For Good | Culture Amp | |
|---|---|---|
| Who It Listens To | External clients & beneficiariesVulnerable populations — people who depend on your organization for housing, health, or safety | Internal employees — salaried staff engaged through a corporate HRIS backend, with authenticated profiles |
| Primary Use Case | Measuring & improving the quality of human servicesUnderstanding what clients experience and acting on it to deliver better care | Corporate HR analytics — employee engagement, performance tracking, and organizational health metrics |
| Deployment | Secure on-site kiosks + Web + Phone + QROn-site at your facility — no personal device, no login, no barrier↑ Meets clients where they are | Desktop and mobile apps — requires an authenticated corporate account and assumes professional digital literacy |
| Anonymity | Zero-footprint — no logins, no trackingComplete anonymity eliminates fear of retaliation or loss of services↑ Highest trust, most honest data | Aggregated anonymity tied to HRIS backend — profiles are authenticated, responses are aggregated but individuals are identifiable in the system |
| Trauma-Informed Design | Built-in validated templatesQuestion phrasing, UX flows, and emoji inputs designed for vulnerable populations↑ No one else does this | None — designed for corporate HR culture, professional literacy, and employee wellness contexts |
| Crisis Alerting | AI intent detection & immediate emailSurfaces safety threats and urgent client concerns the moment they're submitted↑ Catch problems before they escalate | None — designed for long-term engagement trend analysis, not real-time crisis response |
| Accessibility | Low-literacy emoji inputs & 150+ languagesOne-touch language switching for populations who may not be fluent in English↑ Reaches clients others can't | Corporate digital localization — designed for professional multilingual teams, not unhoused, low-literacy, or newly arrived populations |
Deploying Culture Amp to measure how your clients feel is like using payroll software to track service outcomes. It's not the wrong product used incorrectly — it's the wrong product entirely.
Culture Amp profiles are tied directly to a corporate HRIS system. Every employee who uses it is identified. That's a feature for HR analytics — it lets you segment by department, tenure, or level. But for a client in a domestic violence shelter or a substance abuse program, the idea that their feedback is tied to a profile in any system is exactly the barrier that prevents honest responses.
Pulse For Good collects no personal data — no logins, no IP addresses, no email tags, no personal devices linked to any response. For clients who have experienced systems that failed them, who fear that speaking honestly might cost them a bed or a meal, this isn't a privacy feature. It's the foundation of trust — and without it, the data you collect reflects self-censorship, not reality.
Culture Amp is fundamentally designed to make your organization a better place to work. That matters — staff wellbeing directly affects service quality. But it cannot tell you what your clients are actually experiencing: whether they feel safe, whether their needs are being met, whether a specific staff member or facility is falling short. Those questions require a completely different instrument listening to completely different voices.
Pulse For Good was built specifically to hear from the people who depend on your services — the voices most affected by your organization's work and least likely to be captured by any existing feedback mechanism. That population is defined by power dynamics, access barriers, and a rational fear of speaking up. Every design decision Pulse For Good has made — kiosks, anonymity, emoji inputs, trauma-informed UX — exists to overcome those barriers.
Pulse keeps us honest. We lead with the windows wide open.
— Paul Armstrong, Chief of Staff, San Diego Rescue Mission
Pulse For Good vs. every alternative in the market.
See how Pulse For Good captures client feedback that no employee survey ever could.