People & communities

Make room for different experiences.

Understand how people experience your service.

The question behind the work

Complaints arrive without context. Surveys come back from the same few people. Those with the least access, and often the most at stake, go unheard.

Collect stories by link, phone or paper. People interpret their own experiences; your team explores the patterns and stories before making changes.

How it works

  1. Co-design one open prompt with the people involved.
  2. Collect stories by link, QR code, phone, or paper.
  3. Participants place their own story on simple scales.
  4. Staff work through the patterns together in a sensemaking session.
  5. Repeat the cycle to see what has changed.

How the BC Employment and Assistance Appeal Tribunal heard from appellants

Mailed surveys returned one or two responses a year. About 30% of appellants had no computer or phone access, so law-student volunteers called people and used a paper version. The tribunal heard from enough people to act. It now asks consent for hearing observers days in advance, checks what hearing-room windows face, and has coordinators introduce themselves before a hearing. Staff proposed changes in their first workshop and were still meeting every two weeks 18 months later. The project received a BC Premier's Award for Evidence Based Design.

Source: interview with Emily Drown, Chair, BC Employment and Assistance Appeal Tribunal.

"We heard all sorts of things we didn't know we needed to ask about."

Emily Drown, Chair, BC Employment and Assistance Appeal Tribunal

Limits

The Chair describes the changes as very small, and the 2022/23 annual report says only that anecdotal evidence suggests they are making a large difference. No outcome measure is reported. Respondents were self-selected. Some appellants needed phone or paper because they had no computer access. The longer account is on Case stories.

Also used by

State of Minnesota. MN StoryCollective is the name of that work. This page does not describe it.

Questions

Who owns the data? You do. We do not use it for any other purpose. See the Trust Center for how data is handled.

Who controls access? Admin rights can be limited to your own staff.

How much staff time does it take? A first sensemaking workshop is enough to start.

Can you work with our procurement? Tell us how your organization buys, and we will go through the options with you in the pilot conversation.

What do our privacy and IT reviewers get? See the security review page and the Trust Center. The program is HIPAA-aligned, and a BAA template is available. HECVAT responses are available on request.

Does Spryng use AI? Spryng's AI-assisted features are transcription, translation and redaction of responses, and the optional AI Pattern Synthesis add-on. Each is optional. An account owner can ask us to turn any of them off for their organization by emailing privacy@spryng.io, and we confirm in writing when it is done. Turning off AI redaction does not turn off rule-based redaction.

Next step

A public-sector pilot starts from $4,950. That covers instrument design for one instrument, Calibration & Review, one online collection for a standard 10-week pilot, and one readout session. Phone or paper collection, a second session, and hosting outside the default region are quoted separately. The scope is fixed and confirmed in a written quote. It is one question, one collection, a sample report, and a readout with your team. See what a pilot looks like or read the full BC interview.

What stories revealed beyond the survey

Emily Drown describes why the BC tribunal tried a different way to hear from appellants. Interview excerpt. 3:50

Read the video transcript

Why not do a normal? So that's a, that was what I asked when I, I first heard about active sensemaking. And I guess I, um, had gone to a seminar where, um, the consultants we ended up working with, um, Terry Miller, he was, he was at this seminar and was showcasing what active sensemaking was about. And it really resonated with me because, um, The tribunal had been sending out surveys, a user experience survey with each of our final decisions. And we were averaging getting about one or two back a year. So really they were telling us nothing. We would mail them out. We'd never see them again. No one took the time to complete them. And when Terry said, you know, you can get people to share stories. Everybody likes to tell a story. That really resonated with me. I have an English degree. I love stories. I think words matter. And so that resonated with me. And I started to think, what we could find out from people's stories. The more I researched and talked to Lori Webster and Terry Miller, the more I realized that we serve this vulnerable population where people seldom, at least people in positions of power over structures and procedures, seldom ask for people's opinion. We filled out surveys, tell us if you're unhappy, We know people are unhappy, but we don't know why. And we don't know what people's actual experiences are. We know the people who pick up the phone and yell at us. We don't know about the people who don't call. And so it dawned on me that doing active sensemaking could confirm some of the things we thought we knew, would let us know whether we were on the right track with suggested changes, could let us know where we might have missed the mark, but it would also tell us about what we didn't know we needed to ask about. And I think that's one of the places where the magic really lies is when you do a survey, you're asking people to give specific information about things that you already have a sense about. You know, tell us about how you liked our computer interface. Tell us about how you found the hearing procedures? Were you satisfied or dissatisfied on a scale of to But by doing this, we were saying, tell us about an experience at the tribunal. And so we heard all sorts of things we didn't know we needed to ask about. With a traditional survey, we have formed a hypothesis, and we're testing that hypothesis. But we miss out on things that we might not have thought to test. And also, the answers are all abstracted. So people give opinions, but we don't know the context of those opinions. And so what you're describing really fits. be able to discover through stories, through the narratives, that there's stuff we never would have thought of asking about that suddenly looms up and we start seeing patterns of that sort of stuff.

Transcript from the video’s caption track.