Accessing Reports

After a session ends, your conversations become a listening report.

Closing the session

When every group has submitted, click Close session on the session card and confirm. That's the signal that you're done recording. It closes any rooms still open and hands the interviews to our processing pipeline. It can't be undone, so don't close until the last group is finished.

From there we take over. Here's what we do with the recordings before the report lands in your inbox:

Transcription. We turn each conversation into searchable text.
Translation. If people spoke in another language, we translate it into your organization's primary language so they don't have to switch to be heard.
Mandated reporting. If anything urgent comes up (self-harm, abuse, immediate safety concerns), we surface it to your team right away, so you're not waiting on the full report.
Anonymizing. We remove names and identifying details from the transcript before using it in shared findings.
Theme analysis. We look for patterns across all the conversations, not just within one group, so you see what's coming up everywhere.
Review. A Polaris team member reads and edits the draft before it's published.

You'll get an email when it's ready. Most reports take 2 to 3 business days. Larger districts, weekend submissions, or runs across many buildings sometimes take longer; we'll let you know if yours will.

There's a fuller breakdown of the whole pipeline on our features page if you want to see all of it.

What's in the report

The layout is the same every time. What fills it comes from your questions and your conversations.

A typical report has:

Three counts: conversations, estimated speakers, and unique data points (the report notes explain each).
Three key voices in shaded cards, chosen to show distinct experiences.
Theme bars showing how often ideas appeared. Each bar uses a full 0–100% scale; themes can overlap.
Strengths and challenges in green and orange, with supporting quotes embedded in the findings.
Question findings you can expand to read the evidence.
Impactful Steps organized by effort, plus Insights connecting findings to relevant research and practical options.
Explore Data, where available: searchable quotes, saved analysis, filters, and a CSV download.

Quotes retain their source references. When verified audio is available, you can open the linked clip. Playback follows the conversation's access and voice-privacy settings.

Sentiment in an empathy interview

Sentiment tags each response as positive, neutral, or negative. It tells you tone, not how everyone feels, so read it next to the themes and quotes.

Closing the loop

The most useful thing you can do with a Polaris report is go back to the people who took part with what you heard.

It doesn't have to be a big change. People notice when something they said led somewhere. Explain what you can act on and what still needs discussion.

You don't have to act on everything in the report. Pick one or two steps, make the progress visible, and tell people how their conversations informed it.

Starting another session

Your Polaris contract includes 4 listening sessions a year. When you're ready for the next one, Start listening session is back on your dashboard as soon as the current one is closed.

Two paths people usually pick:

Same questions, different season. Re-run the same prompts a few months later and compare. Useful when you're tracking how a specific theme is moving over time: climate, belonging, instructional quality.
New questions, fresh ground. Co-create a new set with your team. Useful when something different came up that's worth listening for on its own.

Either way the workflow is the same: co-create the questions, get consent set up, run the session, monitor it, and review the report. Across repeated sessions, look at what changed, what stayed the same, and where people describe a different experience.

If you want help picking a path or writing the next set of questions, your Polaris team is happy to talk through it with you.