The partner program

If you facilitate sessions and analyse the results for someone else - a municipality, a client, a community - the partner program is built for you. Your organisation becomes a partner: it hosts a separate workspace for each client engagement, keeps each client’s data cleanly boxed off, names the client as the data owner, and can hand the whole thing over when the work is done.

A few signs it’s for you: you run a citizens’ assembly that the municipality owns; you interview a client’s customers and want them to see the findings without paying for a seat; you run dozens of short engagements a year and need each one isolated, billed separately, and easy to transfer at the end.

Only dembrane staff can mark your organisation as a partner. You can’t toggle it yourself - ask your dembrane contact, or see becoming a partner. Once you’re a partner, any of your workspace admins can create external-client workspaces. Being a partner doesn’t change your own tier; it just unlocks the external-client flow and the billing and handoff that go with it.

What the partner flag turns on#

Being a partner adds three capabilities. Your own internal work carries on exactly as before.

1. External-client workspaces. Admins can mark a new workspace as serving an external client, not your own team.
2. Separate client billing. Each external-client workspace bills on its own, instead of drawing on your organisation’s pooled seats.
3. Handoff. A finished engagement can be transferred to the client as an independent organisation.

External-client workspaces#

You create one like any other workspace, but you tell dembrane it’s for a client and supply who really owns the data: the data-owner organisation name (e.g. “City of Haarlem”), the data-owner email (the client contact), and a partner agreement checkbox confirming you’ve agreed terms. dembrane records when you accepted it.

dembrane then bills the workspace on its own, auto-invites the data owner as a free observer so they can watch at no cost, and lets you put the client’s (or your own) logo on the participant portal. Each client’s conversations, billing, and branding stay in their own box. For the walkthrough, see external-client workspaces.

Observer and external#

Two workspace roles carry client engagements. Both show in grey to signal they’re outside collaborators.

• Observer is free and read-only. They can view projects, read conversations, and view reports - nothing else. Observers cost nothing, only exist in external-client workspaces (internal workspaces reject them), and the data owner is invited as one automatically.
• External is a paid seat for an outside collaborator who needs to do real work: read conversations, edit projects, use chat, and generate (not publish) reports. They can’t create or delete projects, capture, or invite.

To turn an observer into a paid external - say the client wants to generate their own reports - an admin just changes their role. For day-to-day work with both, see observer & external collaborators.

Moving and handing off work#

• Move projects. You can move a project, or several at once, between workspaces - handy for reorganising as a programme grows or separating one client’s work from another’s.
• Handoff. When an engagement is done, the workspace can be transferred so the client owns it as an independent organisation, no longer billed through you. Handoff is done with staff help.

The full procedure is on data ownership & handoff.

Referrals#

When you bring dembrane a client who later signs up, that can be tracked. The referral ledger records the relationship and any agreed terms - a kickback percentage, a client discount, a cap, an expiry. dembrane maintains it; you don’t manage it yourself. Set the terms with your dembrane contact, and see referrals for the overview.

Related#

• Data ownership & compliance - internal vs external, data owner, white labelling, GDPR posture.
• Roles & permissions - the full capability matrix, including observer and external.
• Tiers & billing - per-seat pricing and what observers cost (nothing).
• Partner guides - everything above, from a partner host’s point of view.