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Reporting on Ideas Data

Understand how to interpret data collected using the Ideas tool

Vishwas Prasad avatar
Written by Vishwas Prasad
Updated this week

The Ideas tool allows participants to post and vote for ideas about your project. When your consultation ends, there are three ways you can collate and analyze your Ideas 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 Ideas submission, and relevant participant 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 Ideas tab to see your data. Each tool instance has its own tab, so multiple Ideas tabs may exist.

    the ideas tab in the excel detailed project report

The Ideas tab contains 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 submissions, upvotes, and comments.

  • Contribution information: Columns D-K provide contribution details such as the contribution date, idea or comment title and details, the poster’s screenname, number of votes and visitors, and a link to the attached image.

  • 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.

    the participant detailed in the excel detailed project report

Using the Ideas Tool Report

The Ideas Tool Report will provide useful graphs and insights into your Ideas posts.

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

Overview

This section includes:

  • The number of Ideas 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 overview section of the ideas 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 ideas tool report

Ideas Visitor Statistics

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

  • Visitors

  • Contributors

  • New Ideas

  • Likes

  • Comments

This information can help you compare your ideas tools between projects to see which tools received more visitors and contributions.

the visitor statistics in the ideas tool report

Ideas Insights

This section lists all the submissions on an Ideas tool, including the date submitted, the screen name, and the idea’s votes, title, content, and image.

You can use the drop-down menu to switch between Ideas tools and the Signup Form Question drop-down to filter by demographics.

the insights section of the ideas tool report

Text Analysis

In Text Analysis, you can analyze the free text of ideas posts using tags to organize your ideas, demographic filtering, and sentiment analysis.

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

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