Don't share reports with clients, share your data!

When it comes to presenting findings and insight with colleagues and clients, the procedure is usually the same. Create a written summary report, deliver the Powerpoint presentation, field any questions, repeat until everyone is happy.

But this approach tends to produce very static uninspiring reports, and presentations that lack interaction. This often necessitates further sessions, if clients or colleagues have questions that can't be directly answered, want additional clarifications, or the data explored in a different way. And the final reports don't always have the life we'd want for them, ending up on a shelf, or buried in a bulging inbox.

But what if rather than sharing a static report, you could actually share the whole research project with your clients? If rather than sending a Powerpoint deck, you could send them all of the data, and let them explore it for themselves? That way, if one of the clients is interested in looking at results from a particular demographic group, they can see it themselves, rather than asking for a report to be generated. If another client wants to see all the instances of negative words being used to describe their brand, they can see all the quotes in one click, and in another all the positive words.

In many situations, this would seem like an ideal way to engage with clients, but usually it cannot be facilitated. To send clients a copy of all the data in the project, transcripts, nodes, themes and all would be a huge burden for them to process. Researchers would also assume that few clients would be sufficiently versed in qualitative analysis software to be able to navigate the data themselves.

But Quirkos takes a different approach, which opens up new possibilities for sharing data with end users. As it is designed to be usable by complete novices at qualitative research, your project file, and the software interface itself can be used as a feedback tool. Send your clients the project data in a Quirkos file, with a copy of the software that runs live from a USB stick. You can even give them an Android tablet with the data on, which they can explore with a touch interface. They can then quickly filter the data however they like, see all the responses you've coded, or even rearrange your themes or nodes in ways that makes sense for them. The research team have collected the data, transcribed and coded it, but clients can get a real sense of the findings, running searches and queries to explore anything of interest to them.

And even when you are doing a presentation, while Quirkos will generate visual graphs and overviews of the data to include as static image files in Powerpoint, why not bring up Quirkos itself, and show the data as a live demonstration? You can show how themes are related, run queries for particular demographics segments, and start a really interactive discussion about the data, where you can field answers to queries in real time, generating easy to understand graphical displays on the fly. Finally, you can generate those static PDF or Word reports to share and cement your insights, but they will have come as a the result of the discussion and exploration of the project you did as collaborators.

Isn't it time you stopped sharing dry reports, and started sharing answers?