The Visioner tool makes it easy for your community to participate with their ideas at the beginning stages of project, plan or strategy. It's an idea generating tool that also encourages input on feedback from others.
The Visioner tool enables participants to post short statements of up to 140 characters in response to a single prompting question. Statements are displayed as a visual wall of virtual ‘post-it’ notes, that can be viewed by other visitors, sorted and filtered, and optionally voted on.
The Visioner is a great tool to collect qualitative thoughts, ideas and issues in a concise format that is easy and fun to use.
💡NOTE: The Visioner consists of two Blocks: 'Visioner Input' for asking questions and collecting responses, and ' Visioner Result' for displaying the results.
When setting up the blocks, you can choose whether to enable and define a list of categories, allow participant voting and choose how visitors filter submissions. You can also choose how the tool displays and even select different Visioner input tools to display results.
This means you can choose whether to display results or not and even choose to display results on a different page.
🖼️ Example
⚙️Settings (Input)
Basic
- Activity Status - allows you to make the tool active (on) or inactive (off).
- Activity Question - sets the main question for the Visioner that prompts participants to respond.
- Activity Description - provides a description that can be used to provide further information about the activity, including leaving internal notes to other users.
- Display Description - when selected, the description will be displayed to visitors.
- Activity Dates - allows you to set a close date for this Visioner engagement for reporting purposes only. Please note this does not automatically close the activity.
Activity
- Categories - sets a number of pre-defined categories that participants can choose from to classify their contribution.
- Member Attributes - adds pre-defined Member Attributes to the input form of the Social Map to collect participant information. Member Attributes are defined at the Sitewide level and allow the collection of standardized user information that can be reused later.
Display
- Placeholder Text - allows you to add custom text in the input field to provide the participant with additional prompts.
Advanced
- Registration Required - sets whether a participant must be a registered Member to make a Contribution. When enabled, this will override the registration defaults set at the Sitewide level. Note that it does not restrict the ability for participants to vote on contributions.
- Moderation Method - allows the moderation method to be changed between Post-moderation (default) and Pre-moderation. Adjusting the moderation method will override the Moderation Method settings set at the Sitewide level.
Notifications
- Contribution Notifications - allows notification messages to be sent to the nominated users every time a participant submits a contribution on this Visioner.
📒 Viewing results and reports
You can access your results and view reports for a Visioner activity by going to Dashboard --> Reports --> Results. Click the 'View Results' link next to the relevant activity name to view the report.
Information in the report is filtered by the date range, which you can adjust at the top-right of the report. Some reporting information relating to categories and voting will only be shown if these features were enabled in the activity.
To get further information about any reporting metric, hover over the question mark at the top-right of the reporting component to view a description.
Reporting
Summary
The 'Summary' section of the report provides the following information:
- Key statistics - shows a number of top-level metrics relating to the activity including:
- The number of contributions collected through the activity.
- The number of unique contributors who made contributions.
- The total number of votes cast in the activity.
- The average number of votes cast per contribution, indicating the intensity of the voting activity.
- Sentiment - a bar chart showing the overall sentiment analysis of all posts in the activity, classified as either 'positive', 'negative', 'neutral', 'mixed', or 'unclassified'. This information is determined by Site Users by applying the text analysis tools.
- Tag word cloud - a word cloud visualization showing tag (theme) analysis of all post content, with the size of each tag determined by the number of times the tag was used. Tags used more frequently display at a larger size in the word cloud than those used less frequently. This information is determined by Site Users by applying the text analysis tools.
- Tag table - a table showing the number of times (count) a tag was used in the tag analysis and the percentage of times that tag was used as a proportion of total tags.
- Voting - a chart showing the overall results of the voting activity. The visualization type will depend on the voting method used in the activity (e.g. upvoting or upvoting/downvoting).
The summary report can be exported as a PDF by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page. This will export the entire report as a single PDF including the overall report and a report for each category.
Overview
The 'Overview' section of the report includes high-level meta-information about your activity including information about whether participants were registered Members or anonymous, when the activity occurred, what devices and browsers were used by participants and a breakdown of selected demographic information (for member participants only).
This report is standard across all participation tools. More information can be found in the Reporting section.
Data
The 'Data' section of the report includes the raw data collected through the activity, in a table view.
The data table for the Visioner includes the following information:
- Contribution ID - a unique identifier for the post.
- Date submitted - the date the contribution was made.
- Response - the text comment left in the contribution.
- Upvotes - the number of upvotes a contribution received.
- Downvotes - the number of downvotes a contribution received.
- Total votes - the number of total upvotes and downvotes a contribution received.
Additional fields containing the personal information of the participant may also be appended to the data table.
Data from the data table can be exported by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page. Data can be exported as either CSV or XLSX.
💡 Data can be filtered on a number of attributes by clicking the 'Show Filters' button at the top of the page and adjusting the values. Any filters applied to the data table will persist in the data export.
⚙️Settings (Results)
Basic
- Participant Voting - enables visitors to vote on the Contributions of other participants and sets the voting method (e.g. upvotes or upvotes / downvotes). When enabled, a ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ icon will appear next to each Contribution shown in the Visioner Results Block.
All Members and un-registered visitors can participate in voting activities when this setting is turned on.
Display
- Visioner Input - selects the associated Visioner Input Block to display results from. Results can be displayed from any Visioner Input Block on your site.
- Voting Display - enables the results of any voting activities to be displayed to visitors. This setting is independent of the ‘Participant Voting’ setting, and simply shows or hides the voting results.
- Filters - enables a variety of categories that can be used to ‘filter’ the Visioner Results. Some filter categories are dependent on whether voting activities are enabled, and the type of voting allowed (e.g. upvotes / downvotes).
- Progressive Loading - allows you to set a specific number of public contributions that are displayed before displaying a ‘Show more’ button.
🎯Key actions
Add the Visioner
The Visioner consists of two separate Blocks that can be added in different locations of the page, or even on different pages.
To add the Visioner:
- Add the Visioner Input Block to the desired location on the page.
- Adjust the Block Settings including the Activity Question (the key user prompt) in the ‘Activity’ tab.
- Select the ‘Save’ button on the Block Settings.
- Add the Visioner Results Block to the desired location on the page.
- Adjust the Block Settings ensuring that the associated Visioner Input Block is selected from list in ‘Visioner Input’ field of the ‘Activity’ tab.
- Select the ‘Save’ button on the Block Settings.
Filter categories
A key feature of the Visioner is the availability of categories by which participant’s Contributions can be filtered by visitors. The available filter categories and definitions are as follows:
- Popular - Determined by the number of up-votes, down-votes and total votes. Specifically, each Contribution that has received a minimum of one vote is given a ‘popular score’ which is weighted against the total number of votes it has received.
- Contentious - Determined by the difference between upvotes and downvotes.
- Rising - Determined in the same way the ‘popular score’ is determined, however it is based on the number of votes received in the last 24 hours, rather than total votes.
Enable participant voting
Users can enable participants to vote on other participants’ Contributions.
To enable voting:
- Open the Block Settings of the target Visioner Results tool on the page.
- Navigate to the ‘Activity’ tab.
- Turn ‘Participant Voting’ to ‘on’ and select the desired voting method.
- Select the ‘Save’ button the Block Settings.
It is currently not possible to restrict voting to registered members, so all visitors will be able to use the voting functionality.
Voting is session-based, meaning that a participants can only vote once per user session, but may be able to vote multiple times across multiple sessions (e.g. different devices, different browsers, clearing their browser history, etc).
Display voting results
Participants can be enabled to view past voting results even after the participant voting has been disabled.
To turn the voting results on:
- Open the Block Settings of the target Visioner Results tool on the page.
- Navigate to the ‘Display’ tab.
- Turn ‘Voting Display’ to ‘on’.
- Select the ‘Save’ button on the Block Settings.
Set up categories
Users can enable participants to select from a list of predetermined categories to classify their Contribution. If a participant selects a category for their Contribution, the category selected will be able to be filtered by visitors and will also appear in the results data.
To set-up categories for the Visioner activity:
- Open the Block Settings of the target Visioner Input tool on the page.
- Navigate to the ‘Activity’ tab and set the ‘Categories’ option to ‘on’.
- Type a category into the field and select the ‘Add’ button and repeat as required.
- Select the ‘Save’ button on the Block Settings.
Remember, the Visioner tool comprises of two blocks. An input and output block. To have the results show, you will need to add an output block in a page.