The Forum tool allows participants to create forum topics and post comments about forum topics. When your consultation ends, there are three ways you can collate and analyze your Forum data:
You can analyze your data while the consultation is ongoing for some preliminary insights, but you will not be looking at your final dataset. To report on the final dataset, please ensure that the project or tool is archived so there will be no more contributions.
Using the Detailed Excel Report
The Detailed Report will show you overall tool statistics, each Forum submission, and relevant participant data. To generate the report:
Go to Reporting > Project Reports, choose the relevant Projects and date range, then select Update.
Expand the Download Report menu and select Excel under Detailed Report. This option is only available when you have selected five or fewer projects.
Once the download is complete, open the ZIP file and the relevant project file. There will be an Excel file for each selected project.
Go to the ForumTopic tab to see your data. Each tool instance has its own tab, so multiple ForumTopic tabs may exist.
There are three sections to explore:
Summary information: Columns A and B provide an overview of participation and a breakdown of the participant type (registered, unverified, anonymous, or admin). It also contains the contribution count, including comments, topics, and votes.
Contribution information: Columns D-L provide contribution details such as the contribution date, comment details, the poster’s screenname, replies and which comment they responded to, and the number of agree and disagree votes.
Signup Questions: Columns N and onwards contain each of the questions in your Signup Form and your users' answers. We provide this information so you can filter your submissions using demographic data. Please note that this information is only available if a contributor is registered and logged in when they submit.
Using the Forums Tool Report
The Forums Tool Report will provide useful graphs and insights into your forum topics and comments posts.
To generate the report, go to Reporting > Tool Reports > Forums. You can explore the following sections once you filter to the relevant Projects and date range.
Overview
This section includes:
The number of Forum Topics tools, including Published, Draft, and Archived tools.
The Visitor Summary lists the Visitors, Contributors, Contributions count, and the participant type. You can use the drop-down menu to choose a specific tool’s statistics.
The Engagement Summary bubble graph. In this graph, larger bubbles indicate more contributions. The vertical axis indicates the number of visitors, while the horizontal axis indicates when it was published. The hamburger icon lets you download the graph as a JPEG, PNG, SVG, or PDF.
Demographics
In this section, you can use the Signup Form Questions to see graphed participant data from registered users who contributed to the tool. If you don’t use registration or used unverified participation for this tool, there will be no data here.
The hamburger icon lets you download the graphs as a JPEG, PNG, SVG, or PDF.
Forum Topics Visitor Statistics
This section includes the project and forum topic title and the number of:
Visitors
Contributors
Comments
Votes
Comments by Admin
This information can help you compare your forum topics tools between projects to see which tools received more visitors and contributions.
Forum Topic Insights
This section lists all the submissions to a forum topic tool, including the date submitted, the screen name, comment content, the number of replies, and agree or disagree votes.
You can use the dropdown menu to switch between forum topics and the Signup Form Question dropdown to filter by demographics.
Text Analysis
In Text Analysis, you can analyze the free text of forum topics and comments using tags to organize your ideas, demographic filtering, and sentiment analysis.
You can also download the Text Analysis report to help extract this data.