Read Your Results: Themes and Topics

The poll page is where results live. It has three parts: the map and timeline in the middle, the list of views down the side, and the theme leaderboard on the right.

Stories, topics, themes

Three words worth keeping straight:

• Story. One person's whole response — their answers, in their words.

• Topic. A specific thing mentioned in a story. Each respondent confirms their own topics before submitting, so topics are what people said mattered, not what a machine guessed.

• Theme. A group of related topics from across many stories. Themes are the level you actually read at.

Themes form on their own as responses come in. You don't have to code anything by hand.

The leaderboard

Themes are ranked by how much of the response they account for, heaviest first. That ranking is the short answer to "what did people say?"

Above the list are four filters, and you can combine them:

• Overall. Everything, ranked by weight.

• Positive. Themes people spoke about favorably.

• Negative. Themes people raised as problems.

• Custom. Themes you built yourself (below).

Reading Positive and Negative side by side on the same subject is often more useful than either alone — it shows you where opinion actually splits.

Open a theme

Click a theme to open its page. You'll see the topics inside it and any subthemes — finer-grained groupings within the theme. This is where you go from "housing came up a lot" to knowing it was three different complaints wearing one coat.

Build a custom theme

Sometimes you're looking for something specific that the automatic themes didn't isolate — a program name, a street, a policy you're about to vote on.

Choose the + above the leaderboard filters:

1. Type a few words describing what you're after.

2. Choose Preview Theme. You'll see how many topics it would pull in and how much weight it carries, so you can tell whether it's a real pattern or a handful of mentions.

3. Adjust the wording and preview again until it looks right.

4. Choose Create Custom Theme.

It joins the leaderboard under the Custom filter. Anyone in your organization can create one.

Read individual stories

Themes tell you the shape; individual stories give you the sentence you'll quote at the meeting. Click a response on the map or the timeline to open it and read it in full.