You understand your organisation, context and decisions. The people affected by the work hold knowledge and experience that should not be overlooked. Gobby brings research design, facilitation, qualitative analysis and a platform developed to help gather and make sense of people’s contributions.
We work with you to clarify the question, review what is already known, choose appropriate methods and agree how people will be involved. Support can range from focused consultancy and analysis to a complete research project delivered in partnership.
Turning experiences into understanding.
Research that
represents people.
The people affected by your work hold knowledge and experience that should not be overlooked.
— the gobby methods
It’s about understanding the process
Co-production methodology and qualitative research is at the heart of Gobby’s identity.
We can work with you to follow a clear process to co-operatively discover meaningful insights.
Start with the right question
Good research starts with purpose, not a long list of questions. We’ll clarify what you need to learn, what decisions the research should inform and what you already know.
This keeps the research focused and makes sure the findings are genuinely useful.
Reach beyond the usual voices
The people you hear from shape what you learn. We’ll help you involve the right people in ways that feel accessible, respectful and worth their time.
The aim isn’t just to collect more responses. It’s to build a fuller picture by including experiences and perspectives that might otherwise be missed.
Get beneath the numbers
Ratings can tell you what people chose. Qualitative research helps you understand why.
By giving people room to answer in their own words, you can uncover experiences, ideas and important differences that tick boxes often miss.
Make sense of what you hear
People’s contributions can be detailed, varied and sometimes contradictory. We’ll identify the important themes while preserving the context and differences behind them.
You’ll get clear, trustworthy findings grounded in what people actually said, not just a collection of quotes or topline scores.
Turn insight into action
Research should lead somewhere. We’ll connect the findings to the questions and decisions that prompted the work, making the learning easier to understand, share and act on.
The result is evidence that can help you improve services, shape plans, strengthen engagement and show people that their contributions made a difference.
— Let gobby work with you
Choose the support you need
Turn hundreds of answers into themes you can inspect, also known as coding. Code responses, review source evidence and compare groups, with optional AI assistance and human judgement in control.
Tell us what you need to understand, who you want to involve and what decisions lie ahead. We’ll help you shape a qualitative research approach that gets beneath the surface and turns people’s contributions into meaningful action.
Ready to hear what people really think?
— useful answers
Before
you ask.
Clear answers about the approach,
without the software fog.
Gobby is a qualitative focussed survey software tool for collecting genuine voices. It has an innovative approach to collecting, grading and themeing open-text answers. Gobby aims to show shared experiences through peer analysis; and by organising qualitative feedback into clear, inspectable, themes.
A qualitative survey uses open, or free, text questions and answers that allow people to explain what they think, experience or prioritise in their own words. It is essential when context and non-typical answers matter but is invaluable with any survey that seeks to understand what its participants really think. We give you the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of a response.
Many survey tools focus on pre-defined answer choices and summary scores, they make you tick boxes and from that formulate an average answer, replacing thoughts with statistics. Gobby brings open answers, peer analysis and thematic analysis together while keeping source evidence available for review. We also allow you to collect and rate only the figures you want to see and that help you to further understand the impact of what is being said.
You ask a question without deciding every possible answer in advance. Participants write their own response, creating room for nuance, context and issues the question writer may not have anticipated. We provide tools to allow people to match, theme, responses, or not. That’s your choice if you want to let them.
We also supply tools to report and moderate responses giving you peace of mind that participants can be protected and surveys can contain relevant, acceptable responses. You can still focus on specific targets but it is done textually not just by statistical calculation.
Peer analysis helps to show what resonates across a group. Gobby can reveal relevant answers, we call them matched responses, from other participants, so people can recognise and validate experiences that reflect their own, or that they are in agreement with. From this you can see the weight a particular point of view has in your respondents.
Thematic analysis involves sorting and grouping responses, this is also called coding (and if you know what you want to do we also give you the tools to do pre-coding).
You group or relate words and phrases into themes, reviewing the evidence behind those relationships to understand patterns across the research. Gobby has a range of tools to help you to do this themeing, and we also offer research services that can do the work on your behalf, from a guiding hand to fully managed surveys.
Gobby uses (completely optional) AI assistance, we call this the Gobby Assist tool. This tool can help identify and organise your survey answers and help you with the difficult task of understanding the open text responses.
You can still review the original responses, refine the analysis and decide what the findings mean and we make sure to clearly identify what was made by a human and what was uncovered using automated tools so you have peace of mind and a way to correctly audit your surveys.
Gobby can support comparison of themes across demographic or participant groups, helping teams see where experiences align and where smaller patterns may differ from the overall picture.
No. AI is an optional support layer within our analysis, not a requirement and not a replacement for researchers, lived-experience review or human judgement. At Gobby we believe in human-led and human-governed research and analysis to ensure that people are kept at the centre of all that we do.
