How Loomio works

Threads and polls to decide on anything together.

Loomio gives you simple flexible building blocks that you can customize for your own unique context.

It all starts with threads.

Loomio uses discussion threads that enable you to frame discussion and engage the right people in the right way to make a clear decision together. Invite the people who need to contribute, frame the decision to be made and facilitate discussion in one easy to follow thread of communication.

Progress decisions using polls.

Loomio gives you the flexibility to use different kinds of polls to progress any kind of discussion forwards towards a decision. Use dot voting, multiple choice, time polls, opt ins, sense checks and ranked choice options to understand what the group thinks, get feedback and iterate proposals.

Loomio polls make it easy to test early proposals and surface important information to improve decision proposals. With Loomio all polls are fully customizable.

Use proposals to make clear, transparent, inclusive decisions together.

Loomio proposals make it easy to finish a decision making process with a clear outcome. Gain a clear view on what the group thinks, when decisions have been made, how they were engaged with and what the outcomes were.

Simple Collaborative Decision Making

Groups use Loomio to make all kinds of collaborative decisions together. It is particularly suited for creating alignment between group members on proposals that may need to iterate a few times before landing in a final decision that needs strong group buy-in to progress meaningfully.

A simple decision making process on Loomio has 3 stages:

Introduce and discuss

Start a Loomio thread to introduce the topic, open discussion and invite people. Include all the context-setting information your group needs to meaningfully participate, along with relevant background so everyone understands the purpose.

Sense check

As your group begins to converge on path forwards, use a Sense check poll to survey opinions and test how the group feels about a direction. Sense checking is a great way to surface concerns, get feedback and refine a proposal before moving to a formal agreement.

Proposal

The decision proposal builds on step 1 and 2 to formally agree on a proposal and move to action. With Loomio you have full control to set engagement deadlines, minimum engagement requirements and voting options. Once completed you can publish outcomes and proposal results are logged, along with a record of the discussion leading to the decision.

For more information on the Simple Decision Making Process check out this walkthrough.