Take a closer look

The Discourse Breakdown area of your dashboard presents your data by topic, location, data item, and source. Each widget offers another way of exploring the conversation and identifying trends and the most pressing issues among your residents.

Tip: Each of the widgets outlined below can be downloaded as a PNG to share with relevant colleagues or to upload into reports.

Most popular topics

All interactions are classified according to a list of topics that correlate to the most common local government departments or areas of focus, such as education or transportation. Organized by topics with the most interactions to the least, scroll through to see which topics are generating the most conversation in your community and whether that conversation is positive or negative.

Hover on any topic for a more detailed breakdown, or click on any one to filter the dashboard to just that topic.

Map

The map offers you a way to parse how residents are feeling across the city or county, according to interactions attributable by location. To interact with the map, click “Explore map.” It will lead you to a full size map in the Map tab, where you can filter by topic or source type, or view a heat map.

This vantage point lets you literally pinpoint conversation topics or sentiment trends, helping you understand how resident concerns or opinions might vary across the area and structure messaging campaigns (e.g. knowing which community partners or organizations to reach out to).

Top stories

Items—meaning posts and mentions across all of your connected data channels—with the highest number of interactions are presented in this widget. Any form of engagement is counted as an interaction: comments (and sub-comments), likes or shares. Every interaction is classified by sentiment; you’ll see the percentage of positive and negative interactions found within the item listed at the top of each card. To see all stories, not just the ones with the highest number of interactions, click on “View all stories” to browse all items.

Clicking anywhere on the card will open it up into a fuller view, where you can filter the interactions by type of sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) and sort by date.

For each item, you can also click on the 3-dot menu to view the post or story in its original context, such as Twitter or Facebook.

While the widgets higher up on the dashboard start outlining a picture of the conversation size, general topic and sentiment, the stories really put you in touch with what residents are saying or the concrete stories or headlines that are grabbing residents’ attention.

Channel breakdown

Below the graph, you’ll see the percentage of total interactions each source is responsible for, as well as the percentage change since the previous comparable time period. For example, in the image above, 84% of interactions came from unofficial sources between August 11th and August 17th, representing a 39.6% decrease as compared with the previous 7 day period of August 4th to August 10th.

Clicking on either “Official” or “Unofficial” in the legend area below the graph will automatically filter all the dashboard widgets to display data drawn just from that source type.

To exit the filtered dashboard view, click the “X” on the highlighted “Channels” filter button, located on the sticky menu header at the top of your screen. This will reset your dashboard to show data from all sources.

Source breakdown

This widget shows you the sources that are responsible for the total number of interactions collected in the given time period, in descending order of interactions. For each source, you’ll see the number of interactions, the percentage change as compared to the previous comparable time period, and the percentage of positive and negative interactions.

Hover on any source for more detailed numbers for each of the metrics above. Clicking on any of the sources will automatically filter all the dashboard widgets to display data drawn just from that source.

To exit the filtered dashboard view, click the “X” on the “All Sources” filter button, located on the sticky menu header at the top of your screen. This will reset your dashboard to show data from all sources.