In short. An organiser should see aggregate outcomes: attendance, how much outreach happened, and how many introductions resulted. They should never see message contents, attendee email addresses, or who passed on whom. The Gantry enforces that in the architecture rather than in a policy.
Every networking platform has to answer one question, and most answer it quietly in a settings page: how much of what happens between two attendees can the person running the event see?
Get it wrong in one direction and the organiser cannot justify the event to a sponsor. Get it wrong in the other and delegates stop using it, politely, by not opening the app.
What the organiser legitimately needs
An organiser is accountable for the room. That requires:
- Who said they were coming, and who came. RSVPs against verified attendance. Without it there is no honest headline number.
- Whether the room was used. How much outreach happened, and how much of it was accepted. This is the difference between a full room and a working one.
- Whether anything continued afterwards. Connections made in the window after the event.
- The mix. Whether the people who turned up match what the event promised.
- Repeat attendance. Whether people came back.
All of that can be answered in aggregate. None of it requires reading anything.
What the organiser does not need, and should not have
Message contents. There is no version of “the organiser can read the messages” that survives being explained to a delegate. If a platform can show you what two attendees said to each other, assume your attendees will work that out and behave accordingly, which means using it for nothing of substance.
Attendee email addresses, by default. This is the one that gets argued about, because the list has obvious commercial value. But a delegate who gives their email to a platform has not consented to it being handed to every organiser whose event they looked at. If you want to email them, ask them.
Who declined or skipped whom. A visible rejection is the fastest way to make a room unpleasant. If the organiser can see it, it exists, and eventually somebody mentions it.
Individual behavioural detail. Who viewed whose profile, how long they looked, how many people they passed over. None of it helps run a better event and all of it is uncomfortable.
Why the strict version produces better events
The usual argument against a hard boundary is that organisers will not pay for a platform that tells them less. In our experience the opposite risk is bigger: delegates who suspect they are being watched do not use the thing, and an unused platform produces no outcomes to report at all.
A boundary you can state in one sentence is also a sales asset. “Your organiser can see that introductions happened and cannot see what was said” is a line an organiser can put in their own delegate email, and it raises participation rather than needing to be buried.
Where The Gantry draws it
Organisers see RSVPs, verified attendance from QR check-in, nudges sent and accepted, post-event connection requests, the delegate journey from uploaded list to introduction made, and repeat attendance across their events.
Organisers never see message contents or attendee email addresses, and no attendee is ever shown that they were passed over. Skip marks are stored against the account that made them and every screen and API is built so the other person cannot learn they were skipped. It is not labelled a rejection anywhere, and it does not stop that person reaching out to you.
That is not a configuration option. It is the shape of the database, which is the only place a privacy promise is worth anything.
If you are choosing a platform
Ask the vendor to show you, in the product rather than in a document:
- The organiser’s view of a single attendee. Ask what the most detailed thing on that screen is.
- Whether organiser data export includes email addresses, and whether that can be switched off.
- What an attendee sees when someone declines them.
- Who at the vendor can read a message, and under what circumstances.
The fourth one is the question nobody expects. The answer is rarely “nobody”, and an honest answer is a good sign.