Documentation

The Orbit Sentiment Report helps you to understand the overall positive and negative sentiment across your community at any given time. You can use this report to be reactive to negative activity and understand what community related effort creates positive reactions from your members.

This article breaks down the sentiment report and provides guidance on what you’re looking at and how to work with it.

The Sentiment Analysis report is available from the Reports tab of any Orbit workspace on our Premium or Enterprise plans.

We track sentiment on activities created by all of our integrations, with the exception of HubSpot and Salesforce. GitHub star activity and custom activities created manually or via our API are not included in the analysis at this time.

When you open the Sentiment Analysis report in Orbit, the default timeframe is set to 30 days retrospectively. If you want to broaden or shorten that window of time you can use the date range buttons at the top of the page, or define a specific window using the Custom date picker.

The Sentiment Ratio offers a glanceable view of what percentage of activities that took place in the previous 30 days were positive or negative.

You can hover over the percentages of each to get the exact activity count.

The second chart we display is the day by day breakdown of positive and negative activity counts.

As in the image above, on some days you will see gaps. This means that the activities on those days were classified as neutral (neither positive, or negative).

You can click any of the bars to open the activity timeline filtered to this date and sentiment in a new tab.

Within your chosen timeframe we will show you a list of members with the highest sentiment. This list is populated with community members that have more positive than negative activities. Neutral activities are not counted.

Similar to the above, except that you will only see members with more negative activity than positive activity here. Again, neutral activity is not counted and typically, this list will have less members than the Highest Sentiment list and will sometimes be empty.

If this list is empty but you do see negative sentiment within your chosen date range, it is likely that the same user performed the same amount of positive and negative activities, effectively cancelling them out.

On the activities tab in your workspace, you have the option to filter the timeline by the sentiment applied to the activities shown.

An activity that has a positive or negative sentiment can be edited or removed. On the activity timeline, an activity with sentiment will have a button in the top right that tells you whether it is “Positive” or “Negative”. You can click on this button to edit or remove the sentiment from the activity.

We recommend checking daily for positive or negative sentiment activity.

If you have positive sentiment activity, check what it was and see if there’s an element to it that can be repeated by you or your team (it could be a good response to their question, a quick resolution to an issue, a new feature, or a great event).

Do the same for negative sentiment, but use it as a trigger to reach out or highlight issues that need to be addressed. Can you turn that negative activity into a positive next activity?

In addition, consider keeping track of your sentiment ratio each month. If you’re overwhelmingly positive each month, that is great, but if your negative sentiment percentage is gradually increasing month on month, there might be a problem that needs to be addressed. Use your daily checks to try and spot common themes that can be addressed as root causes and try to remove them.