How to Read the Heatmap Report

So, what is a Heatmap?


A Heatmap is a color-coded table that will instantly draw your eyes to the highest and lowest scores as well as provide other visual cues as to where scores sit. 

Viewing Heatmaps


One of the most powerful ways to understand your survey results is via our Heatmap report. Heatmaps let you visualize results by any demographic to quickly uncover outliers and show you where to focus your efforts.

Typically you'll generate heatmaps for an organizational demographic such as race/ethnicity or school; however, it is possible to create heatmaps for any demographic we pull from your SIS. School heatmaps are a great way to identify schools that are doing well and schools that could use some help. Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Grade Level heatmaps give a view of diversity and Program heatmaps provide a view on particular cohorts within the school or district. 

The Heatmap report is available to all admins, in addition to people who have been given access to the results. The results each user sees is based on their visibility/permissions--meaning a district admin will see data for the entire district and a school admin will on see data for their school.

To view a demographic heatmap, navigate to the Heatmap report and select a demographic from the "Group By" dropdown in the top left. The Heatmap initially shows factor results by presenting each demographic group as a Percent Favorability from the aggregated scores. 

You can view the results for Questions associated with a particular Dimension by clicking the "View" drop-down in the top left.

Heatmap Colors

The Heatmap is designed to highlight the biggest differences in results for particular demographics when compared with the aggregated results. Note that the Heatmap colors are always based on the favorability from the first column. The most positive differences are highlighted blue and the most negative differences are highlighted orange. 

As the difference between a group and the aggregated results gets larger, the shading gets darker. It's designed as a visual cue to call out large differences between groups, so that you don't have to read through every single cell in the comparison grid. You want to focus on the questions and the groups that show darker shades (i.e., larger differences) as these reflect students with different experiences.

Heatmap Numbers

The numbers in the cells are the percent favorability for the dimension/indicator or the question (depending on which "view" you have toggled). The grey numbers in the column headers represent the participation for the respective populations (see example below).

Color Key

Questions To Ask:

  • Looking at the demographics you have available in your survey, identify 2 or 3 that your leaders will be most interested in seeing the breakdown for (e.g. School, Grade Level, Race/Ethnicity, Gender).
  • Within these demographic splits, are there any groups that stand out as particularly high or low?
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