Conceptual Model
Understanding how Passionfruit thinks about questionnaires, answers, and compliance.
Passionfruit helps companies answer complex questionnaires at scale, especially in sustainability, quality, and compliance reporting. To do this effectively, it structures its domain around a few core concepts. Understanding these concepts will help you make the most of Passionfruit.
Questionnaires
A Questionnaire is the core unit of work in Passionfruit. It represents a set of questions a company needs to answer—often coming from sustainability frameworks like CDP, CSRD, EcoVadis, or customer-specific audits.
A questionnaire in Passionfruit can be:
- Created manually
- Generated based on previous templates
- An Excel, Word or browser form.
Every questionnaire is uniquely identified and versioned, enabling teams to track changes over time and reuse previous work.
Questions & Answers
Each questionnaire consists of multiple Questions, which can be:
- Free text questions
- Multiple-choice questions
- Tables or matrix-style inputs
- Numeric fields
- File uploads or evidence requirements
Answers are stored alongside questions. Passionfruit ensures:
- All answers are tracked with metadata (who answered, when, and with what evidence)
- Versioning to maintain historical records
- Semantic mapping so similar questions can be recognized across questionnaires
Approved Answer Library
Passionfruit maintains an Approved Answer Library. This is a knowledge base of previously vetted answers that can be reused in new questionnaires.
Benefits of the library:
- Speeds up questionnaire completion
- Ensures consistency in responses
- Reduces errors and omissions
- Stores references to supporting documents (e.g. policies, reports)
Whenever Passionfruit recognizes that a question is similar to a past one, it can suggest an answer from the library for review.
Knowledge base
Many questionnaires require Evidence — documents, spreadsheets, certificates, or policies that substantiate the answers. Passionfruit manages evidence as first-class objects:
- Stored in dedicated evidence buckets (e.g. S3)
- Version-controlled to ensure the latest documents are used
- Linked directly to questions and answers
- Health-checked for validity, approval status, and expiry dates
Evidence integrity is critical for audits and regulatory compliance.
Workflows
Passionfruit structures the process of completing questionnaires into Workflows, supporting:
- Drafting and reviewing answers
- Tagging questions for team members
- Tracking progress across large questionnaires
- Managing approval cycles
Workflows help teams collaborate and ensure that complex submissions are completed accurately and on time.
Automation & AI
A major goal of Passionfruit is to reduce the manual work involved in questionnaire answering. It uses AI for:
- Semantic search: finding similar past questions
- Answer generation: drafting responses based on past answers and documents
- Formatting answers into required structures (e.g. tables, free text)
- Confidence scoring to signal how reliable an auto-suggested answer might be
Even when using AI, Passionfruit keeps humans in the loop. Users always review and approve suggested answers.
Security & Compliance
Given the sensitive nature of sustainability and compliance data, Passionfruit emphasizes:
- Strict access controls
- Encrypted storage
- API auditing and logging
- Versioning of both data and evidence
- Alignment with regulatory standards like GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.
Security is integral to Passionfruit’s design.
Passionfruit’s Philosophy
At its core, Passionfruit aims to:
- Reduce repetitive work by leveraging AI and past data
- Ensure consistency and quality in compliance reporting
- Empower teams to collaborate efficiently
- Maintain auditable records to withstand regulatory scrutiny
By understanding these core concepts, you’ll be ready to navigate Passionfruit and make your compliance processes smoother and faster.