WORD CLOUDS

When was the last time you saw 60 people in the Education Building scribbling on 300 sticky notes? If you guessed November 16th at the parish wide listening session, you are right! We gathered these responses to the five questions that day to begin collecting your short word phrases to help build a base of information to guide us in our search process. We did the same for the sticky note responses to the four questions gathered during the October 16th parish wide meeting with Rev. Marion Sprott from the Diocese.

Your Search Committee felt that the task of analyzing this information, organizing the collective thoughts and themes of our fellow parishioners present for those events discerning those thoughts and themes as part of the committee’s charge, and then sharing all of this with all of you as part of our journey together during this process was extremely important.

228

~57

per question

Post-it Notes

We present this organized information for you today through the links below. These links can also be found on the St. Matthew’s website. Through these links, you will find each question from these two parish wide meetings, each individual response transcribed from each sticky note, and the visual results of the organized themes that collated out of the process through “Word Clouds” for each of the 9 questions. You will also find a methodology for this process.

The Word Clouds illustrate all the responses and the top ten theme aggregates of those responses. Each response is animated: you are able to drag your computer mouse cursor over each word or phrase to magnify it for easier reading.

The “engine” to produce these Word Clouds is a very powerful software called Word Art (www.Wordart.com). We populated the software with all the sticky note responses for each question asked during both the October 19th parish wide session led by Rev. Sprott, as well as those produced during the November 16th session led by your Search Committee. We then worked within the software program to analyze word count, phrasing, and structure of each comment on the way to identifying the top 10 response themes for each question. The top themes are sized within the word clouds based upon this process.

Your Search Committee hopes that you enjoy exploring this information! Please be mindful that these word clouds illustrate the thoughts and themes based solely upon the parish wide meetings and are for everyone’s benefit. They are also a small part of the larger collection of information collected during our cottage conversations during the past several weeks.