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The Impact Score is a single number Sleekplan calculates for every feedback post. It answers a question a vote count cannot: not “how many people asked for this”, but “how much does building this actually matter”. It combines how badly people want the post, who those people are, how much discussion it generated, how happy those customers are, and how fresh the conversation is. The score is internal. Your end users never see it on the widget or public portal, so you can weight your most valuable customers heavily without anyone on your board noticing.
The Impact Score is calculated on the Starter plan and above. Changing the weights and limits requires the Business plan or above. See Plans and billing. Only workspace owners and admins can open the Impact Score settings. See Roles and permissions.

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Why a score beats a vote count

A vote count is a popularity contest. It treats every voter the same, rewards whoever shouted first, and never fades. That produces three familiar problems:
  • Your biggest customer counts once. One vote from the account paying you the most looks identical to one vote from a free trial that churned last year.
  • “Nice to have” looks like “we will churn without this”. A vote records that someone wants it, never how badly.
  • Old posts stay on top forever. A request that peaked three years ago outranks something the market is asking for today, because votes only ever accumulate.
The Impact Score fixes all three. Votes are still part of it, but they sit alongside the priority people attached to their vote, the weight you assigned to those specific customers, the depth of discussion on the post, the satisfaction scores of the people involved, and how recently the post saw activity. With the right weights, a post with 40 votes from weighted enterprise customers who all marked it Critical can comfortably outrank a post with 200 casual votes. Because every part is a lever you control, the score is not our opinion of your roadmap. It is your prioritization policy, applied consistently to every post on the board.

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What goes into the score

Sleekplan tracks eight signals. Seven of them make up the base score, and recency is applied on top when the board is displayed.
Company weight only counts once you have groups. It reads the weight you set on each company or team, which needs the Business plan and customers who arrive with a company attached. Until then this part of the score contributes nothing, so set Company weight to 0 and give that share to Customer weight instead.If you do have groups, check Max company weight before you rely on this signal. It ships at 50, and at the default group weight of 1 a post would need fifty different companies to get full credit. Set it near the number of companies you would expect on a genuinely popular post, or raise the weight on the accounts that matter most.

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How recency behaves

Recency is applied when the board is read, not when the score is stored, so it is always current without waiting for a recalculation. A post loses freshness gradually and reaches zero freshness once it has gone untouched for the length of your recency window. What counts as “touched” is the post’s last-updated time, which moves when your team edits the post, when someone leaves a comment, or when tags change. Votes, priority votes, and new followers update the score itself but do not reset the freshness clock. In practice that means a slow trickle of votes will not keep an otherwise dead post permanently fresh, while a live discussion will.

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Sort and read your board by impact

1

Open the Display panel

Go to Feedback and click Display in the header.The Feedback board with the Display panel open, showing Impact score under Lead with and Impact under Sort
2

Sort by Impact

Under Sort, choose Impact. The highest-impact posts move to the top of the list.
3

Show the score on every row

Under Lead with, choose Impact score. Each row now leads with its score instead of its vote count, so you can compare posts at a glance. The score also appears in the details pane of any post you open.
Read the number as a ranking value, not a percentage. What matters is how posts compare to each other on your board, not the absolute figure. When a post reaches the top of that list, open its Insights tab to see what is actually driving the score: who voted, which accounts they belong to, and how urgent they said it was.
Save the impact-sorted board as a view and pin it to your sidebar. It becomes your standing “what should we build next” list, and it stays correct as votes and customers change without anyone maintaining it.

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Weight your most valuable customers

Vote weighting is the single highest-leverage setting, because it is what separates the Impact Score from a headcount. A customer with a weighting of 10 contributes ten times the customer weight of a default customer.
1

Open the customer

Go to Customers and click the person you want to weight.
2

Set the vote weighting

Click Edit, then set Vote weighting in the record panel. The scale runs from 1 to 10, and every customer starts at 1. Click Save.A customer record in edit mode with the Vote weighting field highlighted in the record panel
A simple scheme that works well: leave free and trial users at 1, put paying customers at 3 to 5, and reserve 8 to 10 for the handful of accounts whose renewal you would fly across the country to protect. You do not need to weight everybody. Weighting only your top accounts already changes the ranking substantially.

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Tune the weights

The defaults are a sensible general-purpose mix, but they encode a generic product team’s priorities, not yours. Tuning takes a minute and changes every ranking on the board.
1

Open the Impact Score settings

Go to Settings → Audience & Impact → Impact Score.The Impact Score settings screen showing the Normalization Limits section
2

Set the normalization limits

Each limit tells Sleekplan what “a lot” looks like on your board, so a post that reaches the limit gets full credit for that signal and anything beyond it does not run away with the ranking. Set each one near the highest realistic figure you would expect on a busy post: Max total priority, Max customer weight, Max company weight, Max vote volume, Max comments, and Max subscribers.Limits set far too high flatten the score, because no post ever gets near them and every post looks similarly small. Limits set too low make many posts hit the ceiling, so the signal stops distinguishing them. Aim for a number your busiest posts approach but rarely exceed.
3

Set the weights

Each weight decides how much its signal counts. Values run from 0 to 1, where 0 switches the signal off entirely. They do not need to add up to 1, so raising one weight does not force you to lower another.The Weights and Recency sections of the Impact Score settings
4

Set the recency behaviour

Recency weight decides how strongly freshness affects the ranking, and Recency window (days) sets how long a post takes to fully fade. A short window such as 90 days keeps the board firmly focused on the current quarter. A long window such as 730 days lets long-standing requests hold their place.
5

Save

Click Save. Every post on the board is recalculated in the background. While that runs, a banner appears and the fields are locked, so wait for it to finish before making another change.

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Starting points

Rather than adjusting every field, pick the profile closest to your business and change only the two or three weights it names. Change one thing at a time, sort by Impact, and look at the top twenty posts. If the order matches the conversation your team would have had in a prioritization meeting, the settings are right. If a post you know is important sits too low, look at which signal it is missing rather than raising every weight.

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Good to know

Scores recalculate in the background shortly after activity on a post: a vote, a priority vote, a comment, a new follower, or an edit by your team. Saving new settings recalculates every post at once, which takes longer on a large board. Recency is applied live every time the board loads, so freshness never waits for a recalculation.
Sorting by Impact hides posts whose score is exactly zero, which is normally a post that has had no votes, priorities, comments, or followers at all. Switch to another sort, or use filters, to see the full board including untouched posts.
No. The score is stripped from every response the widget and the public portal receive, so there is no way for a visitor to see it or infer it. It is returned by the REST API, which only your team can call with your API key.
Starter calculates the Impact Score with the default weights, but changing them requires Business or above. When you save on Starter, an upgrade prompt appears instead. See Plans and billing.
Precedence is a manual label your team sets on a single post, so it records a decision you have already made. The Impact Score is calculated from what your customers actually did, so it helps you make that decision in the first place. Most teams sort by Impact to decide, then set Precedence to record the outcome.
Two things have to be true before it counts. Your workspace needs companies and teams, which arrive with your customers on the Business plan, and Max company weight has to reflect how many companies a popular post really attracts. It ships at 50, so with the default group weight of 1 almost every post scores near nothing on this signal until you lower that limit or weight your important accounts.
Priority is off by default. Turn on Priority in your board settings so users pick a level when they vote. Until it is on, the two priority signals contribute nothing, and you should move their weight to customer weight and vote score.

Filters, sorting, and views

Every sort and display option on the feedback board, including where Impact fits.

Submission and voting

Turn on priority and downvotes, and rename the priority levels.

Organizing feedback

Categories, tags, and statuses to structure the board the score ranks.

End-user accounts

How your customers exist in your workspace, and where to find them.