 |
| Veteran theater group post-performance hug! Source: Bedlam Veteran Outreach |
As Veterans (and Family members and Friends) at Pathfinder.vet, we wanted to figure out why and how we make these choices, and how we could make better choices. We also wanted to see if there was a way for organizations, and maybe even the city where they do business, could improve based on the information we were providing. And since we have the data tools with some pretty cool Natural Language Processor (NLP) analysis we've adapted from studies at University of Texas at Austin and Stanford University, we thought we would give it a shot. 12 organizations with 19 different Veteran, Family, Servicemember, and Caregiver (Community Members) art access and workshop programs in the NYC area were analyzed, with 113 user reviews aggregated and anonymously checked so we could see what it was that worked and what didn't. We formed a composite as a way to see what language stands out and what needs and challenges exist across the community, while protecting the reviewers and the organizations at the same time.
The full report is around 10 pages, but here are some of the insights and the recommendations we've made to the participating organizations and municipalities (and took to heart ourselves):
- Build my community if you want my ratings. Community Members are looking for a real community, not just lip service. This means a feeling of acceptance, a warm atmosphere, and inclusion. Partnerships can be formed and referrals made among organizations to foster these things, but the worst thing they can do is leave Community Members high and dry after an event, or make them feel used. They definitely want to see Community and Message as organizational priorities, as we found these are two of their top three priorities by a significant margin during linguistic and semantic analysis.
- Stories and goals help drive structure. NLP put Pathfinder.vet's reviewers in the 79th percentile and 73rd percentile for structure and goal-setting, respectively, and language analysis also picked up on the need for stories. That means we need to have a path, a goal to our events, even if it's as simple as "Today we are going to share this story and this is what you should get out of it." Preferably, however, the Community Members want to discover a way to share their story, as they also rank very high (92nd percentile) for learning, so teaching will usually beat presenting.
- Negativity is to be expected... even when we want to be positive (or when we really mean it). Ratings can be biased no matter what, but with Community Members the tone is important. Even in positive reviews, negative tone and high stress indicators ranked in the 73rd percentile. Meanwhile, review numbers ended up often being "down ballot" (all 1 or all 5) due to passionate feelings even if the text of the review gave clues indicating contrary rankings. We get the passion: experiences are personal and can have a dramatic effect, both good and bad. We are working on ways of showing both organizations and reviewers the most balanced way to anonymously reflect every thought. But organizations should also consider the effect responding to reviews can have: this type of passion, if properly responded to, can have a great effect on the community. Change in the right direction can really help relationships, just by showing you are listening. We are coming up with ways to make that happen very soon, so Community Members get reviews written!
So how and why do we choose? We look for a way to share a story or have a story be shared. We look for a message we agree with and one we believe will be upheld. Our needs for structure, for goals, must be met to have a positive experience, and whether we mean to or not we may be critical of the experience. But most importantly, we are all working together at this as a community.
For more information, feel free to contact us.