Version 2.14 introduces Form and People reports that take the hard work out of reporting.

Understanding who is participating in your engagement activities is just as important as understanding what they are saying. Without this information, it is hard to tell just how representative your feedback is and whether you can trust it to inform decisions.

To provide these insights, we've introduced an entire new set of reports. The People section leverages data collected from your Members so you can better understand your participants' demographic and spatial profiles, and interests.

Currently, the 'People' section mostly relates to data collected through the Member registration process. If you are not collecting this data from your Members or encouraging participants to become Members, now is a great time to start doing so. Please contact support for advice on this; we are always happy to give guidance.

People reporting features

The new People reporting section contains the following information:

• Summary - the number and proportion of 'Member participants', 'Member contributors', 'Member contributions' and 'Followers' involved in your project(s). In some cases these people may only represent a small sample of your overall participants, while in some cases they may represent 100% (e.g. where Member registration is required).
• Demographics - interactive charts of your participant's demographic information including 'Gender', 'Age' and 'Gender by Age' to understand which cohorts of your community are represented (and which are not).

• Location - a map showing the location of your Member contributors and a list of the postcodes with the most contributions (requires postcode information).

• Member interests - a list of your Members' stated topics and locations of interest.
• Participant data - a new data table showing detailed information on all your Member contributors and Followers along with their profile information. This will allow you to undertake a more detailed analysis of your participants.
• Follower data - a data table showing a list of Followers for a particular project or projects (this table can also be accessed from the Overview section). The report automatically filters out Site Users and Followers who have 'un-followed', but these filters can be turned off to get the full picture.

Things to note

When using and interpreting the People report there are a few things to note:

• If you do not collect age, gender, postcode, or interests from your Members, the reporting will show up as 'no-data'. We are investigating future support for non-postcode locational attributes to be included.
• We use Geo-names as a service to geocode and map all postcode information. Please be advised that this database is not always 100% accurate and the locations may not appear in their exact location in some instances. If spatial accuracy is important to your results, you should use a different geo-database.
• Site Users are excluded from the Contributor Feed, Participant Data table and Follower Feed.
• Site Users and Members who have 'un-followed' a project are automatically filtered out of the Follower datatable, but can be viewed by disabling the filter.
• The Participant Data includes Member information and therefore may include personal information that will be shared with anyone with access to the Reports.

Not everyone is a data expert – for most of us, that isn’t part of the job description. Even if you’re a data ninja, there’s a good chance your time is too precious to be spent cooking up charts and graphs to illustrate your results.

We've listened to your feedback and have introduced new reporting features for your forms and surveys. The new Form reporting is both functional and beautiful, and will automatically crunch your results and turn them into stunning reports, complete with interactive data visualisations.

After clicking the 'view the results' link from the 'Results' section of the Reports area, you will now be able to see three sections at the top of the page: 'Overview', 'Summary' and 'Data'

Overview

In the Overview section, you will now have access to a number of analytics that will help you:

• clearly see total contributors and contributions figures within a selected date range
• view the split of contributors and contributions between Members and non-members (anonymous)
• visualise contributions over time
• understand which devices and browsers people used to make their contribution
• see summary demographic information for Members who completed the survey including their 'Gender', 'Age' and 'Gender by Age' to understand any potential skew or biases in your results
• view the locations (by postcode), topics and location interests of Members who have contributed.

Summary

In the 'Summary' section, a question-by-question summary for each question in your form or survey will be provided. For quantitative questions, aggregated results will appear as dynamic data visualisations (e.g. donut or bar charts) along with a corresponding frequency table so you can check out the detail.

For qualitative questions you will be able to see excerpts of the most recent comments that give you a flavor of what is being said by your participants. This will make it easier for you to see what people are talking about and gauge how they are responding to your questions at a high level.

Data

In the 'Data' section, you will be able to see the raw data of your results as per the current version.

Each data visualisation and its underlying data can also be exported, so you can easily add these to a presentation or import them into another program for further analysis. And if you just want to share the final results with others, you can simply export and share or print a beautifully designed PDF report.

We're updating the way that the 'Views' metric is measured to ensure that all visits will have at least one page view associated with it. Currently, if a user's visit session expires due to inactivity, and the user comes back to their computer (say after several hours), a new 'Visit' is recorded but not a new 'View' (provided they haven't refreshed or reloaded the page).

The changes will mean that a a new page view for the second session will now be recorded. The effect will be a more logical measurement of the percentage of people that have visited your project pages.

The updates are scheduled to occur on the weekend of the 6 October 2018 and will be applied to all historic data. No downtime will occur.

Most customers should expect their 'Views' statistic to increase, generally in the order of ~10%.