STEP 4 -- Archiving, Exporting Results and Conducting Analysis

Well, congratulations on an excellent session! We hope you enjoyed the experience, that your sponsor was impressed and engaged, and that your fellow teammates gave you a high five. The good news is that you have a lot of data from your Converge session—the bad news is that you have a lot of data from your Converge session. It’s really not bad news…it’s just that you now need to review the data for analysis, key theme and findings. We are there to greatly accelerate this effort.

This step of our facilitation journey will pick up right when you finish your session and take you through archiving your session, exporting data and using Converge AI analysis tools to review you session data. Let’s start with archiving.

Archiving Your Session

When you complete the facilitation of your session it is still in your active sessions gallery. We do recommend that right after completing your session you use your edit session setting to drop down and make your current session unavailable so it cannot be accessed by anyone except you (and any other authorized leader) while you review your session and archive it. Here are some recommended steps in that process:

Take 15 quiet minutes after the session and just review the activities to make sure there aren’t any partial text responses (someone just put in the word ‘the’ as an idea, for example). Don’t delete any real responses, just delete if it’s a fragment. If you are a researcher you may want to make sure everyone completed any demographic background survey you used (if not, you can access that activity as the participant by copying their URL in the registration settings and add the demos if you have them). If you are running a session with multiple groups and asked them to mark what group they are participating in (for example in a final feedback survey), make sure they marked the right one. Really simple things, but do this before you are ready to archive the session and export data for analysis.
We will assume that this is the only session for this agenda or is the last session for the agenda so you are complete with any further facilitation with this agenda. If you skipped any activities due to time, go ahead and mark them as ‘unavailable’ so your export into Word does not include the skipped activity;
Now, in your edit session settings, right at the top of the settings, you will see a checkbox for Archived. Go ahead and check that now, click on update right above it and your session will be moved from the active session roster to your list of archived sessions. These archived sessions are accessible to you/your leaders that were in the active roster and also to anyone that you set as a reviewer for your sessions. Reviewers can be members of your team or the actual client if you choose to give them access. Observer class IDs no longer have access to a session that has been archived. An example of an session being prepped for archive is below:

NOTE: A session can be unarchived at any time, for example your client asks you to run another session with session for another group of participants. You can unarchive, add a new group and then run your session. Also note that Converge does not presently auto-delete your archived sessions, that is up to you. We have the ability to create automated deletion protocols but we are not doing that in the shared server. It’s your data as a licensee. The data is there until you actually delete the session.

Exporting Your Session Data to Word and Excel

Now that you have reviewed and archived your session, you can take a first step on your export and analysis. When you are at the session agenda (you can do this when archived or unarchived, we just recommend that you archive first), you will see an EXPORT button near the upper right of your screen. Here you have several options:

You can export your document to Word, The export will ask you whether this is a session guide (we covered this in the guide development step) or Final Session Document. Click on Final Session Document and Converge will download the results and put them in a shell document with a cover page you can edit, a TOC page that picks up activities as H2 headers, and of course all of the session data. At our Center we take the time to spellcheck the session data for readability, but we don’t change content. After review and spellcheck we update the TOC and we have a transcript document that has all data/responses. It’s a terrific interim deliverable for the client as you are working on additional analysis. We’ll also usually take the Word document and convert to PDF so content cannot be changed.
In the same export pulldown you can export the data into Excel. This puts all users along the left side in a column and then builds a spreadsheet where each question is a column to the right and response data for that participant is in the associated question column. This is a pretty standard approach for the export of data and you can now run pivot tables or even upload the excel export to other tools such as PowerBI. Converge only includes active participants in the export.
IMPORTANT: As a researcher/licensee, when you export, unless you have used the Lock Anonymity setting, you will be able to see the names and IDs of the participants and how they responded to the questions. This can be sensitive if you share with an end client so we generally delete the name/ID column if we send to a client. Again, your data, so you are in control.

So, very quickly you can handle a Word and/or Excel export. We generally send these to our end client the morning after the session. They are hard deliverables in a soft process. But they are just the beginning of the analysis. You have a series of analysis tools at your disposal that are offered by Converge:

AI Analysis

Activity Level AI Analysis: For each Ideas activity and open text question in the survey activity you can conduct 3 different AI calls:
- SUMMARIZE: This call will look at the open text data and return a paragraph style summary at the top of the data. You can save it to be part of your archived session, you can edit it, delete it and (most importantly) copy it and drop it into an analysis document.
- VISUALIZE: This call will let OPENAI look at the data and provide a visual chart that it feels is interesting/relevant. You can decide whether it is relevant for your analysis, but it could be that you are reviewing live with a client and just wanted to give a sense of some themes visually. You will see a small menu bar in the upper right of the chart that allows you to print the chart or download it in different formats.
- CUSTOM: This is really powerful. When you click on Custom it gives you a custom prompt window for ChatGPT where you can construct your own prompt. The result can be saved, edited, copied or deleted. Many of our clients use the custom prompt on key open questions to generate a list of key insights for their reviews and them paste them in an insights deck.

NOTES: For Ideas activities, leaders can also run the categorization function while in archived mode. You get also get there via a custom prompt but it is a quick way to look at a list of 10-12 key themes. Also note that when you run these tools we have added a ‘broadcast’ mechanism if you were in your live session where you could actually share the results of the tools real-time with participants and/or observers. Very valuable in a workshop environment, just kind of impressive in a regular session. All of these tools (except categorization) are also available to anyone you set as a reviewer for access to the session. For example, if you wanted to give a session observer the ability access and review, you would just change their status in the registration settings window. They can use their same access link, but now as an observer.

Session Level AI Analysis—AI Synthesis: The above tools are very valuable to go in and look at specific text-based activities. In 2023 we added the AI Synthesis tool that exports the entire session to an AI review and provides analysis (an overall set of findings and a page of findings/activity) in either Word or PPT format. Let me repeat that: you can export the entire session and in a couple of clicks have an analysis document in Word or PPT. Most popular is the PPT version, it’s a terrific way to generate a base review deck for the session. You can only access the AI Synthesis tool as a licensee leader, we do not make this available to reviewers.

You access the AI Synthesis tool from the EXPORT pulldown, the process then is quite intuitive and runs as a background task in Converge so you can start it and move on to other tasks and it will let you know when it is completed. It automatically downloads the results into Word or PPT (whichever you requested). Based on the size of the session it might take 3-5 minutes to produce the Synthesis. Sorry for the delay! The EXPORT options that we have reviewed this far are shown below along with the panel on creating an AI Synthesis

This is a very powerful tool and we encourage you to explore it as an element of your analysis. Note that AI Synthesis is a single pass with the prompts, we also wanted to take the AI support one more step so in 2024 we are announcing the AI Console for extended/conversational analysis.

Announcing the AI Console Featuring AI Assistants: Man, the Converge development team has been busy. By integrating OPENAI API’s, we are now proving our licensees with a new portal, integrated into Converge, for analysis of Converge and Non-Converge data. This is based on prototyping with a subset of our licensees in 2023 where we provide access to upload IDI and quant data and provide an open prompt for access. Prompts could be saved and data results could be copied. These were, in some cases, very complex prompts assuming the personas of researchers and generating powerful results. However, they were constrained by token size on file uploads and were not conversational.

OPEN AI announced a beta for GPT4 and their Assistants functionality late in 2023 and we have now migrated our AI Console support to the AI Assistants model. You can now upload your exported Converge Word session document for extensive analysis via an AI Assistant in a conversation mode. It is a far more efficient upload and modeling effort relative to token sizes. We are also extending this support to non-Converge data. This, we think, is a real value-add for our licensees—it creates a terrific level of convenience and also, we believe, encourages you to take the next steps in the AI journey. For our licensees, you will now see an AI CONSOLE button just to the right of your SESSIONS button when you are on a session (active or archived) or in the session gallery.

Once you click on the AI Console, you will see the Assistants that have been created in your organization. You can also create a new assistant as shown below and then begin a conversational thread to ask your assistant to review uploaded files. You can share an assistant that has been created, but (for now) your threads (conversations) with that assistant are private to you. We are (all) still quite early on the AI Assistants journey but we think it is very powerful and adds considerable value to your Converge license. We’ll keep you posted as we add new capabilities and support for the AI Assistants.

Announcing the AI Assistant—Integrated With The Right Sidebar: Converge has taken the idea of AI Console and greatly simplified the use. We know have an AI Assistant integrated into the right sidebar panel. You access it by clicking the ‘robot icon and then, after a session has been completed, you can begin a natural AI conversation with your assistant and ask very direct questions about the overall results and insights. An example is shown below, here I was asking the assistant about the key challenges for the Cactus League (Spring baseball in Arizona) in the future (it’s a comprehensive response and can be copied or exported as you continue your conversation with the assistant).

Filtering Data

Additional Analysis Tools—Filtering: One final set of tools is the ability to filter session data, whether a single session or a consolidated set of sessions (multiple groups) via our integrated filtering capability. Take a look at the example below, it is a series of 3 sessions conducted with Maricopa County residents to ask about a number of impressions about serving on a jury. The first level of filtering is to look at the data by one or all of the sessions that were conducted:

In this case I have marked Group 1—SJ (Served on Jury) and all data is filtered by that group only. Next, I will reset the filter so it is all three sessions and use the FILTER capability that is activated when your session is archived—you will see the FILTER button just above the session title. The filter capability allows you to filter data by any selection question in any survey (not just a demographic survey) as well as responses in a select stand-alone activity. We use it mostly for filtering from a demographic survey so we’ll use an example from the background survey for this series. Here we are filtering by number of years (5 or more) in Maricopa Country:

Now, we can use the same filtering tool to extend the query with and/or logic. In this case we will filter on 5+ years in Maricopa County:

The filtering is immediate so you can look at the activities at any time as well as export the filtered result to a Word document or even the AI Synthesis. Filtering is available for leaders as well as reviewers for that given session and multiple people can be reviewing at the same time and working on their own copy of the data.

NOTES: You can see why it might be important, in research types of session, to have a short background survey in the session so you can use those demographics for filtering and analysis—keep that in mind as you are developing your session. In an internal organization session you might ask about number of years in the business, geographic region, etc. Be careful here, you want to emphasize that this information is for analysis purposes only and not used to identify a participant individually.

Final Comments—Exporting and Analyzing the Results of a Session: One of our primary principles at Converge is to accelerate the analysis and insights process. This is where you create your value and impact, understanding the key insights and implications of a session. We are balancing export with the integration of tools in the platform itself.

Get comfortable with the range of tools that are available, you won’t use all of the time, but you will know when to use the ones that are appropriate;
Have an analysis plan—what are you trying to prove or disprove? Why are these insights so important for the client or project?;
Don’t fight the AI trend. Use AI as a tool, but still use your experience and judgement. In many cases you can use AI to validate some of your gut-feel insights.

With Converge you can begin the analysis as soon as you are done with the session—and, actually, during the session if you choose to run some of the activity level AI tools. We hope these prove to be highly valuable and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions on how we continue to extend analysis capability.

Continue to STEP 5 -- Team Feedback Process and Building Your Library