Organizing Exchanges around Objectives is a great way to keep organized and on top of engagements that need planning or follow-up. In this update we’ve added the ability to save custom objectives to rooms that can be used again and again. Any leader with the “Manage templates” permission can create or modify custom objectives by opening the Room Settings menu and navigating to the Templates tab.

We’ve added an Objectives filter to the Exchanges page so you can quickly see and assess all the Exchanges you and other leaders have run around performance, strategic planning, or any other topic you create an objective for! Your custom objectives created in the Templates menu will appear at the top of the list.

In this update, we’ve added the ability to schedule an Exchange to launch at a future date automatically. This is super handy to keep on top of Exchanges in a series that will follow up on one another. When combined with the Objectives filter outlined above, this feature allows leaders and admins to see what has already been discussed and what is coming next. The Schedule option appears in the Plan section of the Edit/Create page for your Exchanges.

This one is a head’s up about a very exciting new feature that will be active in a couple of weeks. Very soon leaders will have the ability to create templated theme sets for rooms. Just like survey question templates, participation groups templates, and objectives (see above), once these theme sets are created they can be applied over and over. The days of creating the same theme sets for different Exchanges will soon be a thing of the past

In our last update, we revamped the process of adding leader comments to thoughts to make it more collaborative. This time we’re doubling down on that by adding the ability to @ mention other leaders on comments in the Discover Dashboard. Leaders can tag any other leader working in the same room or anyone who has been given View or Manage access to the Discover Dashboard for an Exchange.

By popular demand, we’ve also added the ability to comment on Themes. It works just like commenting on Thoughts but leaders can address broader topics that came up a lot in their Exchange.

The next time you create a theme set in the Discover Dashboard things will look a little different but also a little simpler. Now, when you click the “New” button, you’ll be asked if you want to start from scratch with a Blank theme set or copy an existing set. Then all you have to do is give the new theme set a name and click “Create”.

When you click the “Manage” menu for the theme set you will still be able to add, edit, and create new themes, but now you also have the ability to edit the name of the theme set or click the “Delete” button to delete the entire theme set (if you click that button, we’ll ask you if you’re sure so you don’t delete a theme set by mistake).

Leader Insight Reports are a handy new addition to the Reports tab of the Discover Dashboard that provide leaders with a quick glance summary of many of the important analysis metrics from their Exchanges as well as quick links back to the Discover Dashboard to dig deeper. The Leader Insight Report is an efficient hub that gives you a lot of what the Discover Dashboard has to offer all in one place.

Themes do a great job of summarizing what topics popped up in an Exchange, but they don’t immediately tell you how your participants felt about those topics. Leaders have always been able to dig into Themes using the tools in the Discover Dashboard, but in this update we’ve made it even easier by adding the ability to overlay sentiment analysis onto Bars. Now you can see how many thoughts within each theme had a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment attached to them.

A few other simple changes to the Discover Dashboard for 5.9:

• AI generated theme sets will be renamed to Keyword themes
• AI Sentiment themes will be renamed to Sentiment themes
• We’ve improved the messaging in Differences when there are no differences on side B (see image below).

To help participants participate in the way that is most comfortable for them we’ve added the option to turn keyboard shortcuts (which can be used to move through an Exchange) on or off. This option can be found in the Help icon in the top right corner of the participant experience. We will provide a link to a help article with all the details for participants who want some help deciding what they prefer.

Registered participants who access Exchanges that are domain restricted, are not able to participate when their email address doesn’t match the one defined by the restriction. We’ve changed the messaging for participants who get blocked and we’ve made it easier for participants in this situation to login using the appropriate credentials.

New messaging: “This Exchange is restricted to a specific email domain. To participate, you must be logged in with an email address that matches the required domain. Click here to login or sign-up with a different account. ”

Clicking “here” signs the user out and brings them to the sign-in page.

We’ve heard from some participants and leaders that they would like more information about how the statistics in the “View results” section are calculated, so in this update we’ve added messaging to the participant app explaining that we use Bayesian statistics and offering a link with more details. They can click a link to read this help article and learn more.