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Reporting on Places Data

Understand how to interpret and draw data from geo-spatial information collected via the Places tool

Gayathri Rajendiran avatar
Written by Gayathri Rajendiran
Updated this week

The Places tool allows your participants to provide geospatial feedback by submitting pinned locations, comments, images, and survey responses. When your consultation ends, there are three ways you can collate and analyze your Places 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 Excel Report will show you overall tool statistics, each Places submission, and relevant participant data. This report can help you filter and organize your data and import it into another mapping tool to style your data.

To generate the report:

  1. Go to Reporting > Project Reports, choose the relevant Projects and date range, then select Update.

  2. Expand the Download Report menu and select Excel under Detailed Report. This option is only available when you have selected five or fewer projects.

    the excel detailed report button in the download report menu
  3. Once the download is complete, open the ZIP file and the relevant project file. There will be an Excel file for each selected project.

  4. Go to the Places tab to see your data. Each tool instance has its own tab, so multiple Places tabs may exist.

    the places tab in the excel detailed project report

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).

  • Contribution information: From column D, you’ll see contribution details such as the contribution date, the screenname, the latitude, longitude, and address of the pin, the pin category, a comment or link to the attached image, and any survey questions attached to the tool.

  • Signup Questions: Columns after the survey questions contain each question 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 Places Tool Report

The Places Tool Report will provide useful graphs and insights into your Places submissions.

To generate the report, go to Reporting > Tool Reports > Places. You can explore the following sections once you filter to the relevant Projects and date range.

Overview

This section includes:

  • The number of Places 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.

    the ovewview section of the places tool report

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, there will be no data here.

The hamburger icon allows you to download the graphs as a JPEG, PNG, SVG, or PDF.

the demographics section of the Places tool report

Places Visitors Statistics

This section includes the project and Places tool title and the number of:

  • Visitors

  • Contributors

  • Pins

  • Admin Pins

This information can help you compare your contributor pins and admin pins and compare places tools between projects to see which tools received more visitors and contributions.

visitor statistics of the places tool report

Places Insights

The Places Insights provides a variety of data. Use the drop-down menu to select the specific tool, and you can see:

  • A map showing the submitted pins. You can select the filter icon to see different pin categories and use the hamburger icon to download the map a PNG or JPEG.

    a map showing pin contributions in places insights
  • The Contribution Summary, detailing the Total Contributions, Category Distribution, and the User Type. The Category Distribution and User Type are shown in numerals and percentages.

    the contribution summary in places insights
  • The Contribution Details shows submissions in detail, including the pin Category marker, Comment and screenname, Image, Date submitted, Address of the pin, and Suburb of the contributor.

    the contibution details in places insights
  • The Question Analysis section details the comments participants left and their survey responses.

    the question analysis in places insights

Text Analysis

In Text Analysis, you can analyze the free text of Places comments and text-based survey questions. You can use tags to organize your comments, demographic filtering, and sentiment analysis.

You can also download the Text Analysis report to help extract this data.

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