The Guestbook tool allows participants to leave feedback and comments without facilitating discussion. When your consultation ends, there are three ways you can collate and analyze your Guestbook 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 Guestbook 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 Guestbook tab to see your data.
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: Columns D-G provide contribution details such as the contribution date, guestbook entry content, and the poster’s screen name.
Signup Questions: Columns I and onwards 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 Guestbook Tool Report
The Guestbook Tool Report will provide useful graphs and insights into your Guestbook entries.
To generate the report, go to Reporting > Tool Reports > Guestbook. You can explore the following sections once you filter to the relevant Projects and date range.
Overview
This section includes:
The number of Guestbook 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, there will be no data here.
The hamburger icon lets you download the graphs as a JPEG, PNG, SVG, or PDF.
Guestbook Visitor Statistics
This section includes the project and Guestbook tool title and the number of:
Visitors
Contributors
Entries
This information can help you compare your guestbooks between projects to see which tools received more visitors and contributions.
Guestbook Insights
This section lists all the submissions on a Guestbook tool, including the date submitted, the screen name, and the entry content.
You can use the drop-down menu to switch between Guestbook tools and the Signup Form Question drop-down to filter by demographics.
Text Analysis
In Text Analysis, you can analyze the free text of Guestbook entries using tags to organize your entries, demographic filtering, and sentiment analysis.
You can also download the Text Analysis report to help extract this data.