Whatever community engagement software you go with, you’ll want to make sure it has the following features:

1. Open-ended questions with ratings: Get the most accurate data from your group.
2. Themes: Quickly sort participant responses by keyword or sentiment, or create custom themes with an intuitive manual theming tool. Understand qualitative data through a quantitative lens with AI theming.
3. Differences: Identify common ground among polarized groups so you base your decisions on data everyone supports.

Here’s how three of our education partners use these features to engage their communities more effectively.

As the pandemic took its toll on Woodland School District 50 in Lake County, IL, Superintendent Dr. Lori Casey, Communications Manager Brooke Hagstrom, and the Board of Education knew that parent and caregiver feedback would be key to making it through COVID-19.

After using a survey and focus groups to plan their hybrid remote learning strategy for the 2020/2021 school year, some parents complained that the survey didn’t ask the right questions and the focus groups weren’t tapping into a wide enough range of insights.

So Dr. Casey and Hagstrom used ThoughtExchange, leveraging open-ended questions so parents could share their children’s specific needs instead of voting on predetermined options.

They asked:

To help with our planning efforts for next year, please consider the following question: As we wrap up this very unique school year, what do you want us to know about your child’s learning experience?

Surveys invite participants to share one-way feedback, providing surface-level data. But ThoughtExchange leverages your community’s collective intelligence in an interactive conversation, giving you nuanced insights and elevated data. With ThoughtExchange, you don’t just ask—you listen. And your participants listen to each other, too.

Blue Valley Schools encompasses 91 square miles in southeastern Johnson County, Kansas, serving 23,000 students in total. Students identify 90 different languages as their primary home language.

Blue Valley strives to support its community in communication, academics, and social-emotional well-being. But, as Kristi McNerlin, Chief Communications Officer, says, support begins with hearing what the community has to say. “Sometimes leaders want black-and-white data—How many people answered this or that?— but sometimes it’s more about how people feel versus quantitative data from a limited number of survey choices,” says McNerlin.

In 2020, Union Public Schools proposed a change to their mascot. “We felt like [the mascot] no longer matched our core values,” Chris Payne, Chief Communications Officer, says. Eight core values guide Union Public Schools, and the previous mascot violated three of them:

• Inclusiveness, cultivating an organizational culture of accepting children, families, and employees for who they are rather than categorizing them by income, ethnicity, or ability;
• Collegiality, demonstrating respect and an ability to work as team members;
• and Empowerment, helping people reach their full potential.

Knowing they’d need their community’s input to succeed, they used ThoughtExhange.

Payne was worried about the conversation becoming divisive, but ThoughtExchange’s anti-bias technology and anonymous rating system ensured the mascot change didn’t become a contentious issue.

Payne used ThoughtExchange’s Differences tool to analyze and compare groups of polarizing ratings to understand where people agree and disagree so that the district could make sure there was consensus on the final mascot.