FAQs and troubleshooting

Donations

Do Foundation causes charge platform fees? No. Ardent Africa Foundation causes on ardent.africa are verified by Ardent Africa and use a zero platform fee path. Those cause pages do not show the standard fundraising fee breakdown. See the Donor Guarantee and Fees page on the main site.

My payment did not go through. Wait a moment and check your email for a receipt before retrying, so you are not charged twice. If no receipt arrives, try again or use a different method.

Can I donate anonymously? Yes. Choose the anonymous option at checkout and your name will not be shown publicly.

Can I get a refund? Refunds are handled case by case. Use contact and support with your donation details.

Will my dedication show publicly? Only if you ticked the box allowing it. Otherwise it stays between you, us and anyone you asked us to notify. An anonymous gift never appears on the supporter wall at all, so a dedication on one is never shown.

Where does my encouragement message go? Beside your gift on the campaign page.

Why was I not offered a tip or the option to cover fees? Because that cause takes no platform fee. Ardent Africa Foundation causes are zero fee, so the whole gift reaches them and neither offer would make sense.

Can I give as my organisation? Yes, if you hold a seat in one. A "giving as" choice appears and the supporter wall then shows the organisation. Your own name stays on the record so the campaign can reach you.

Petitions

Is my email public when I sign? No. Signer email addresses are never shown.

Can I remove my signature? Contact support with the petition and the email you used.

Can I sign as my organisation? Yes, if you hold a seat in one. A "signing as" choice appears on the form and the signature list then shows the organisation's name and badge instead of yours. You can only pick an organisation you genuinely belong to, and signed-out visitors always sign as themselves.

Do I have to post anything? No. If you never post, nothing else changes: campaigns, petitions, events, jobs and the marketplace all work exactly as they did.

Can people tell that I read their post, or looked at their profile? No. An author sees totals for a post and a profile owner sees a view count and a trend, and that is all that exists. There is no list of names for anyone to be shown, and we are not going to build one. Counting a view records that an account saw something on a day, not how long you looked or how far you scrolled.

Can I schedule a post? Yes. Save it as a draft and set a time, and it publishes on its own whether or not you have the app open. If it fails, the draft tells you why rather than disappearing. See drafts and scheduling.

I saved a post and cannot find it. It is under Saved in the social navigation, on web and in the app. If you filed it in a collection, it is in that folder rather than the main list. Deleting a collection never deletes what was in it.

Can I fix a typo after posting? For 15 minutes, and only the text. The previous version is kept and anyone who can read the post can read it, so an edit is a correction rather than a quiet rewrite.

Who can see what I post in a community? Its members, and the community's page. It does not go to your followers' feeds. A secret community is invisible to anyone who is not in it.

A moderator removed my post from their community. Is that a strike against me? No. A community's rules are its own: removal does not count against your standing on Ardent, does not affect your account, and is not something you appeal to us. The moderator has to tell you why.

Is there any way to make money from posting? No. There are no tips, no creator fund, no subscriptions and no payouts, and there is no money path between people anywhere on Ardent Social. If somebody offers you any of those through the app, it is not part of the service and it is a strong sign of a scam.

How do I stop somebody contacting me? Block them and you become mutually invisible: they cannot see you, message you, or reach you through a mention, and they are not told. A message from somebody you are not connected to never reaches your inbox in the first place. See harassment, blocking and reporting.

Polls and surveys

If a survey says it is anonymous, is it really anonymous? Yes, and it is worth being precise about it. Nothing is stored that connects your response to you: not your account, not your name, not your email address, not your IP address, and not the time you answered, which is kept only as a date. Nobody can read an individual anonymous response, including the person who created the survey and including Ardent staff and administrators. That is not a permission we have chosen not to use; nothing is stored that would let anyone do it.

Can I delete an answer I gave to an anonymous survey? No, and neither can we. Nothing identifies which response was yours, which is the same fact as the protection above seen from the other side. If you want to be able to change your mind, answer an identified survey instead, where your response is recorded against you and all your usual rights over it apply. You are told which kind you are answering before you start.

Can my employer tell how I answered their staff survey? Not on an anonymous one. They see totals only, and where a group is small enough that somebody could be picked out by a combination of answers, that breakdown is withheld from them as well.

Who can create a poll or survey? Any account type. Personal and unverified organisation accounts get shorter surveys and a cap on responses; verified organisations and Foundation accounts get multi-page surveys, branching, file upload questions and batch invitations.

When do results become visible? Whichever the survey says, and it says so before you answer: straight away, once you have answered, once it closes, or never to anyone but the person who made it. The usual setting is once you have answered, so early totals do not sway later answers.

Do I need an account to answer? Not if the survey allows it. One person still cannot answer twice.

My written answer has not appeared. Comments on anonymous surveys are checked automatically before the survey owner sees them, and if that check is unavailable they stay hidden rather than being shown. Nothing has been lost. See polls and surveys.

Durbar (live audio)

What is a durbar? A live audio room. Someone opens it, a few people speak, everyone else listens, and the recording usually stays afterwards as a replay. The name is the West African public assembly, which is the shape of the thing.

How much data does listening use? About 14 MB an hour, which is less than one song. The room prints that figure before you join and shows what you have actually used while you are in it. There is no video, and the audio is encoded for speech rather than music.

Do I need an account to listen? No. A public durbar opens from its link, in any browser, with no account and no app. You need an account to speak, to open one, or to be reminded before a scheduled durbar starts.

Is it recorded? Usually yes, and the room says so before you join. The host decides when they open it. If you only listen, your voice is not in the recording, although your presence in the room is recorded as participation.

What happens to the recording? It becomes a replay page that anyone can play and share, and it stays up. Search engines can find it. You are told this before you join and again before you speak, and the second one is the moment it starts to matter: once you are speaking, your voice is going into something public and findable.

Can I get a recording taken down? If you spoke in it and you erase your account, the durbars you spoke in go with you. Short of that, ask the host, and report the durbar if there is something in it that breaks the rules. A recording is not edited in place, because taking one voice out of a mixed room is not something that can be done cleanly.

Can you stop somebody saying something terrible in a live room? No, and neither can anyone else, on any platform. What a recording does is make it attributable, reportable and answerable afterwards. Hosts can mute, remove and end the room instantly, reporting from inside a live durbar marks the exact moment for a moderator, and an account has to be past its first days before it can speak at all. We would rather say that plainly than imply a filter that does not exist.

The transcript is full of mistakes. It will be. The best available speech recognition gets roughly one word in four wrong on Ghanaian English, and does worse on names. A transcript is there so a durbar can be searched and so you can jump to a moment, not as a record of what was said. Every line links back to the audio, and the recording is the record.

How many people can listen at once? Thousands. Past a certain number, listeners get a broadcast stream running a few seconds behind the live conversation, which is what keeps a large room affordable to run. If you are listening rather than speaking, there is nothing to notice.

Can I speak from the mobile app? Yes. This answer used to say "not yet", and it is no longer true: the app does everything the website does. Open a durbar, schedule it, take it live, raise your hand, speak, run it as host, end it. It also plays in the background with your screen locked. The microphone is only ever asked for at the moment you take the stage, because listening does not use it. Some phones, Tecno, Infinix and itel among them, stop apps when the screen goes off even while you are speaking; if yours is one of them the app tells you once and shows you where to change it.

Can I put a durbar on my own website? Yes, and it is free. Paste the link into WordPress or anything that reads oEmbed and a card appears on its own. There is a WordPress plugin, an embed script, and a read-only API that lists public durbars, who spoke in them, and the transcript of a recorded one. The card links back to Ardent rather than playing audio in your page: listening to a live room needs a sign-in and, for a recorded room, agreeing to be recorded first.

Does a durbar cost anything? No. No fee to open one, no charge to listen, no paid entry, no tipping and no gifts. If you want to charge for a session, run it as an event with a ticket; that money settles through your own payment provider.

Account

I cannot sign in. Use the password reset on the sign-in screen. If you signed up with a provider, use that provider to sign in.

How do I make my profile private? Turn off the public profile toggle in settings (see your profile).

Contact and support

The quickest way to get help is the chat button in the bottom-right of this site: ask the assistant a question, and tap "Talk to a human" any time to reach our support team directly.

You can also reach the Ardent Africa team through the contact options on ardent.africa. Include as much detail as you can (what you were doing, any error message, and the campaign or petition involved) so the team can help quickly.

Last updated: 24 August 2026