Case Studies
See how our approach has been applied to analyze stakeholder input, develop programs, and understand issues. Learn about the organizations and funders supporting this work.
Case Studies
U-M Arts Engagement Barriers Survey 2015 — barriers to arts participation among undergraduate students, spanning time and academic commitments, social motivation, and self-doubt around talent and experience.
Key Findings:
- •Time constraints and academic commitments dominate (~89% of assigned responses)
- •Self-doubt, perceived lack of talent, and audition or competition anxiety form a distinct internal-barriers thread
- •Social motivation matters — students are more likely to participate when friends attend
Two City of Ann Arbor Community Survey open-ended questions, analyzed separately:2007 (937 responses): “If I could change one thing about the City of Ann Arbor, it would be …”2013 (567 responses): “What should be City leaders' top three priorities to maximize the quality of life in Ann Arbor?”
Key Findings:
- •2007 — single change: transportation, traffic management, and biking dominate; urban development, education, and city services form the other major thread
- •2013 — top three priorities: neighborhoods, housing, and transportation cluster as the dominant priority frame; traffic management and pedestrian safety appear as a distinct mobility thread
- •Across both questions: mobility and built-environment concerns persist, but the 2007 framing surfaces taxes and education more prominently while the 2013 framing elevates neighborhood quality, housing, and city services
Topic modeling of Detroit 311-style citizen reports to surface neighborhood concerns: infrastructure, waste management, safety, and quality-of-life issues from resident-submitted requests.
Key Findings:
- •Yard management, drainage, and waste disposal emerged as a major cluster of property-level concerns
- •Urban infrastructure—streetlights, sinkholes, fire hydrants, tires—formed a distinct theme with strong safety implications
- •Resident narratives revealed inequities in service response and enforcement alongside recurring location-specific issues
Public comments from municipal meetings across multiple Michigan cities (Ge et al., 2025)—civic remarks on housing, services, safety, and local governance, with city-level metadata for cross-place comparison.
Key Findings:
- •Drug policy reform, housing and homelessness, and clean-energy transition form the largest thematic cluster across cities (~57%)
- •Neighborhood conditions and local-government accountability—redistricting, ethics, enforcement—recur in comments from multiple municipalities (~20%)
- •Street maintenance and chip-seal or drainage governance frustrations surface in city-specific narratives (~20%)
- •Library programming and community engagement appear as a smaller but consistent thread across places
Analysis of FY25 invention abstracts from U-M Innovation Partnerships to understand research themes and identify emerging areas of innovation across the university portfolio.
Key Findings:
- •Organic electronics and energy systems is the largest cluster (~37%)
- •Cellular and molecular analysis and human-body modeling (~28%)
- •Small-molecule therapeutics and immunotherapy (~22%)
- •Cross-cutting work in maternal health, clinical assessment tools, and collaborative arts
Taubman College R+CP and research-catalyst grant abstracts — mapping funded research themes across architecture, design, and planning.
Key Findings:
- •Media Consumption Spaces and Architectural Innovation (~73%): largest parent cluster spanning digital fabrication, sustainable materials, community design, and urban planning research
- •Black Architecture, AI Design, and Spatial Practice (~14%): AfroUrbanism, architectural archives and exhibitions, and AI design infrastructure
- •Sensory Design and Climate Resilience in Low-Income Communities (~8%): extreme heat in informal settlements and sensory approaches to housing
- •Community Land Trusts and Construction Innovation (~5%): CLTs, zoning, and human–robot collaborative construction
Our Approach
Our methodology builds on these key activities:
Open-ended responses are gathered through surveys, interviews, public consultations, or other engagement methods to capture stakeholder perspectives and concerns. Text responses are then cleaned and prepared, removing duplicates and empty entries while preserving the original voice.
BERTopic-based modeling discovers natural groupings in the data without predefined categories. Topics are then organized into tree structures, with LLM-generated labels and summaries at each level.
Build shared understanding around analytical results, using visual hierarchies and summaries as common reference points that help groups move beyond anecdotes toward grounded discussions.
Situate analytical results within specific organizational, policy, or design contexts, mapping themes onto existing goals and identifying where strategies align or diverge from expressed concerns.
Use outputs to anchor planning sessions, design workshops, and strategy meetings, enabling activities like prioritizing issues, identifying leverage points, and stress-testing proposed actions against the distribution of concerns.
Support iterative use by tracking shifts in attention and concern over time, assessing intervention effectiveness, and enabling systems of learning rather than one-off studies.
Partners
Funders
Supporting arts engagement research and public participation initiatives.
Funding research on humanities applications and public scholarship.
Supporting civic engagement and democratic participation research.
Collaborators
Academic home and primary research institution for the project.
Collaborative research and development partner for the project.
Intellectual property and commercialization partner for the project.
Work with us
The organizations behind these case studies share a common problem: more input than they could meaningfully act on. If that sounds familiar, we'd like to talk.
Voxil is well-suited to:
- Public agencies and municipal governments. Running community input processes, participatory budgeting, or planning consultations where resident voice needs to inform real decisions — and where the scale of input defeats conventional analysis — and where transparency builds trust.
- Foundations and nonprofits. Conducting needs assessments, program evaluations, or stakeholder consultations where the diversity of perspectives matters as much as the headline findings — and where funders and boards need to see that the full range of voices was heard.
- Research institutions. Studying public opinion, civic engagement, or community concerns at scales that conventional qualitative methods can't reach — where interpretive accountability to source material is a methodological requirement, not a nice-to-have.
We work closely with partners through the full process — from data preparation through analysis, interpretation, and activation. Every engagement is different.