Community Engagement Just Became a Whole Lot Easier

BOSTON, Oct. 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Anyone, from a city architect, to a business owner, to a community engagement program leader, can now survey people, understand what they are thinking, and defend those insights without spending hours poring over text. Interpris is a new platform launched today that automatically analyzes all of the words in open-ended survey responses, giving you insights from your community and customers. What used to take weeks in manual analysis is now sped up to merely a few hours. Anyone can now quickly gain new insight and perspective on key community or business questions, allowing you to finally ask the questions you know will give you the why behind your survey data.

Community engagement surveys typically come from a question local government needs answered or because a decision needs to be made. These decisions have deadlines that surveyors must work against, but to get the best results from any research, you want a broad cross-section or group of responses. This need for volume, yet lack of time often leaves surveyors designing their questionnaires with only "yes," "no," or multiple-choice options.

For community residents or anyone responding to a survey, the appeal of participating is because you have the opportunity to share your opinion, to have your voice heard, and contribute to how things may change moving forward. But what happens when survey respondents open a survey, and the multiple-choice options do not allow them express why they hold a certain opinion? The potentially outcome-altering information they have to share is ignored. It is near impossible to analyze and therefore left out, harming our communities, constituents, and the governments trying to serve them.

These challenges no longer need to exist. Interpris by QSR International was built to resolve the exact problem that community engagement officers, and those who conduct surveys, have always had as their number one hurdle, and consumers stand to benefit tremendously once our true voice and opinions can be heard. Through Interpris, researchers can now:

• Analyze Open-Ended Answers: Gain new ideas and insights from answers to open-ended questions that were too time intensive and laborious to include before. Interpris computes this information automatically, so you don't have to read every word written, but can still gain the insights as if you did. Interpris also works with close-ended questions, enabling both types of responses to be analyzed in the same place, and insights combined for more accurate analysis and research outcomes.
• Import from Favorite Tools: How community engagement officers or researchers distribute surveys is completely based on individual preference. Therefore, Interpris imports directly from your SurveyMonkey account, .XLSX, .CSV or .TXT  file.
• Visualize Responses: A picture says more than one thousand words, especially in comprehensively built dashboard visualizations. With Interpris, you can instantly and easily see data. These images can also be handled by drag-and-drop into presentations for policymakers, board meetings, or anywhere the survey results may be used.
• Read Opinion: Beyond learning what constituents want, you can now know the why behind the what. Interpris reads and translates the sentiment of language so you can gain insights far deeper than most current methods.
• Improve Each Survey: Interpris uses machine learning to create algorithms based on the types of survey results being captured. The more you use it, the more personalized your dashboard and insights become.
• Take a Vacation: The average person doing survey analysis gains weeks back from project timelines. Open-ended survey analysis results can now be fully realized in a matter of hours rather than days.

"Consulting the community is really important for the work that we do because everything we do is supposed to be for planning for the good of the community," says James Burdin, AICP, Regional Economic Development Planner at the Strafford Regional Planning Commission in New Hampshire. "The fact that we could input our responses into Interpris, and it did a great job of picking out key themes on its own just made the process of sifting through our data set so much easier."

In the development of Interpris, QSR consulted with public sector employees across the globe to understand their needs and wants related to organizing and reviewing survey data gathered from public consultations and engagement.

"QSR's heritage is built on a solid commitment to the qualitative research community and its future needs," said Chris Astle, CEO of QSR International. "Interpris is the result of that ongoing commitment combined with the input of community engagement analysts around the world, and was designed with their unique needs in mind."

For more information or to download Interpris, visit http://www.interpris.com/.

About QSR International
Every day, QSR International helps 1.5 million researchers, marketers and others to utilize Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) to uncover deeper insights contained within the "human data" collected via social media, consumer and community feedback and other means. The company gives people the power to make better decisions by uncovering more insights to advance their area of exploration. With an innovative suite of qualitative data analysis products, NVivo and Interpris, QSR enables both structured numerical data and unstructured "human" data to be analyzed together, uncovering powerful insights unattainable only through quantitative data analysis. The new insights QSR International's suite of products unlock helps researchers and curious minds worldwide make more informed decisions that create growth, solve problems and improve lives. With benefits for individuals, teams, and organizations, QSR International unlocks big data and research intelligence in ways that are otherwise impossible.

Headquartered in Australia, QSR International maintains offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and throughout Europe. Learn more at www.qsrinternational.com.  

CONTACT: Kristina Groves, (720) 529-4850, [email protected]

SOURCE QSR International

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