Reporting the results

Analysing your results  

Whether your project is a piece of research or coproduction, you’ll need to analyse the results to understand what you’ve achieved.   

Depending on the scale and complexity of the data, you may need help with this.  But usually, it’s something you can do yourself. There are lots of ways you can analyse data, but just like designing survey questions, always use the ‘so what?’ test. What do you need to know, and what questions do you need to ask of the data to get that information?  

Break down your analysis by the different types of stakeholders, i.e. service users, non-users, residents in general, businesses and location. This can highlight differences between people's experiences and provide useful feedback to decision makers. 

Also remember that to need to meet your public-sector equality duties. That means understanding responses from different communities especially those withprotected characteristics in the Equality Act. Use the findings to inform and update your Equalities Impact Assessment. 

If you’re new to this kind work can get advice from:  

• the Consultation and Engagement team 
• the Insight and Intelligence Hub  
• other members of the Participation and Engagement network.  

Quantitative data is the easiest type of data to analyse mathematically and report using charts, graphs or other visualisations. If you’ve used an online survey, Microsoft Forms includes some basic analysis features. It will create graphs and other visualisations, or you can download the results into Excel to analyse them yourself.  

Qualitative data can be collected from open-text survey questions, interviews or events such as focus groups. It is harder to analyse, but there are a number of techniques you can use. Using a ‘code frame’ to count the instances of certain themes or topics are mentioned in the text. AI tools can also be useful for summarising long pieces of text and drawing out the main themes. For simple analysis, a word cloud is a useful way of illustrating the most commonly used words or phrases in a set of texts.  

Producing your report  

The final outputs of your project will depend on a number of things, especially the audience. Who needs to see your report, and what decision might be made as a result of it? Often, senior leaders in the council will not have time to read a long report, so you will need to summarise the key takeaways from your results and present them in a format that is easy and quick to understand.  

Some tips to be mindful of: 

• Graphs and visuals are always better than lots of text 
• If you have used video, visual art or other non-text ways of collecting information, how will you present these?  
• Make sure the results are presented in a fair and unbiased way. Don’t make claims that can’t be evidenced by the data, or cherry pick results to support an argument. 
• What is the story the results are telling, and how can you bring that to life?