When organizations want to understand the concerns, opinions, beliefs, or needs of their communities, clientele, or participants, they often turn to surveys. But I probably don’t have to tell you that surveys have many downsides. To name just a few:
The difficulty of asking the right questions in the right ways to really understand issues accurately and fully.
The difficulty of getting a decent response rate so that you can feel at least somewhat confident that responders’ viewpoints reflect those of the larger group.
The difficulty of extracting actionable knowledge from survey responses without a degree in data analysis.
I recently read about a tool that addresses some of the downsides of surveys. Polis is an open-source, real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words.
Surveys present people with questions like this:
Source: https://www.examples.com/business/assessment/community-needs-assessment.html
By contrast, Polis allows participants to submit their own short comments on a topic specified by the “conversation” creator. Comments are then sent out semi-randomly to other participants to vote on by clicking agree, disagree or pass.
Most interesting to me are the visualizations that Polis generates in a report, which can be shared with all participants. The report includes, a viz like this:
Source: Polis
Each dot represents a comment or statement and is placed along a continuum to show the degree of agreement with the statement. In this conversation, you can see that there were many more consensus statements than divisive statements. And Polis says that’s usually the case. Polis can make consensus visible and thus may be a powerful tool when division so dominates our attention that we may be skeptical that any consensus among diverse groups exists.
When you scroll over a dot, the related statement appears below with stacked bar charts showing the amount of agreement (green), disagreement (red) and passes (gray) among participants overall and by opinion groups. An opinion group is made up of participants who tended to vote similarly on multiple statements and also have voted distinctly differently from other groups. Because the statement shown above (represented by the red dot in the chart) is toward the consensus end of the spectrum, the majority of participants in both opinion groups A and B agreed with the statement. That wasn’t the case for the statement shown below. Participants in opinion group A were much more likely to agree with this statement than those in opinion group B.
Source: Polis
The report also includes a summary of all of the consensus statements. (See example below.)
I can’t vouch for Polis — never used it myself — but I find its basic idea intriguing. If your organization is looking for a better way to understand a large group of people and is particularly interested in finding consensus hidden among all the noisy division, you may want to look into it.
Source: Polis
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