Setting Up Benchmarks for Reporting

Benchmarking allows you to specify benchmarks that can be reported in Individual Feedback and Cohort reports.  They are based on all previous responses for an assessment and are refreshed nightly.

Benchmarks can be configured to

• calculate the average scores
• calculate any percentile value (eg, 50% is the Mean, 75% is the top quartile)
• based on seeded benchmarks, which can be uploaded into the system.

For example, you may show how a respondent compares with the average, but also the top 10% of previous respondents (the 90% percentile.) 

For each benchmark, a response score, section scores, subsection scores, and segmentation scores are automatically calculated and available for reporting in all feedback and cohort reports associated with this assessment.  Please note, benchmarks are not available at the question level.  If you want to report on benchmarks at the question level, you would need to set up a segmentation for each question and link the question to its corresponding segmentation, then run the graphs on the segmentations rather than the questions.

As well as "all responses," you can define benchmarks based on Classifiers.  These allow benchmarking at any level, down to and including fellow team members.  If you, for example, had classifiers of job roles and geographies, you could show benchmark scores for responses from the same role and the same geography as the respondent.   Any chart can show up to three benchmarks alongside the response in a feedback report or responses in a cohort report.    

Multiple assessments can be included in each benchmark provided they are structured exactly the same, i.e. the sections and subsections are aligned.  This means multilingual assessments or copies created for different brands can optionally be rolled into the same benchmarks.   

Steps to Specifying Benchmarks.

1. Indicate that Benchmarking is required by simply ticking the checkbox on the assessment on the Assessment Edit form.  This will initiate the automated nightly calculation of benchmark data.  On this form, you can also
   • associate assessments with a parent assessment.  This is intended for use with multilingual or copies of assessment made for cobranding purposes etc.  The assessments must be aligned on section, subsection, and segmentations.  The responses for all related (assessments that have a parent specified or are the parent) will be totaled into the benchmark.
   • specify a label for "all data".  This might be "All companies" or "All employees", etc. depending on the context of your assessment.  This label is used if you report "all responses on your feedback or cohort report.
   • specify additional benchmarks that may return other than the average benchmark (based on percentiles or seeded).
2. If the further breakdown of benchmarks is desired, you should define Classifiers and enable benchmarking on the Classifiers to be used.
   • Benchmark data is created for each value of the classifier found in the data 
   • The classifiers have a label associated with them that will be used when reporting the data.
   • The calculation criteria is set on the classifier:
     • Average
     • Cutoff Percentile: In this case, a value is entered, for example, 75 for the top quartile.
     • Seeded: where the values are uploaded.
   • The classifiers have a minimum number of responses that are required for each data value before benchmark data is generated.  This is to avoid comparing a response to a "benchmark" that is based on only one or two previous responses. 
   • The Classifiers must be associated with a question in the assessment using the Question Edit. The question may be hidden if you are predefining the classifier when creating the response request.  You can have multiple classifiers associated to one question.

Reporting Benchmarks

Benchmarks are reported by including the "BM" parameter in merge strings in the Feedback or Cohort reports. Benchmarks can be shown on their own using charts like bar charts, bar-on-bar, or alongside the response (s) using charts like multi-bar charts.

Troubleshooting Advice:

If your benchmarks are not showing on your graphs, please go back and check that the Base Benchmark Label has be specified in the Assessment Settings.  See bullet point 16 under the 'General Tab' heading in this help article:  Assessment Settings – Brilliant Assessments.