Happy Holidays!

Best,

Paul Janowitz
CEO and Founder
Sentient Services and icanmakeitbetter.com  

A typical beach, a town after the storm (not the same location)

Philippines

Right now there is no more needed place for help and our money. Water, food and shelter are all desperately needed. We have partnered with Gawad Kalinga along with other donations directed at specific building projects. The Skoll Foundation and Focusing Philanthropy both recognize Gawad Kalinga as the recommended charity to get the most good done as quickly as possible in the Philippines.

Please feel free to donate directly using the links above or let us know any questions at all and other ideas on how to help the Philippines.

Have ideas on ways to can continue to do good as we do good business in 2014? Email me and let me know - we would love to work with other innovative charities and "for good" organizations around the globe.

Website, Hires, Features

New Awesome Feature: Text Analytics

What do I do with all the unstructured data? Text responses, essay questions, focus group discussions? We struggled with that for a long time as well. We looked for solutions and they were either extremely expensive/time consuming/massive projects that took months or years to implement (creating learning algorithms, etc.) - or - they did not work for market research. They did a great job getting brand or ad mentions across social media, but a poor job of being specific to a particular question - what if your question was "What brands do you NOT like?" instead of "What brands do you like?". 

So, like every other time we've found ourselves with an itch that the current software market cannot fully scratch - we built it ourselves. We are now the proud owners of an elegant, easy, powerful text analytics solution. 

Introducing icanmakeitbetter.com's Smart Text! Now for every verbatim question type (even including focus group responses) we provide a powerful, simple text summation tool (yes, software can be all three of those!). It grows smarter the more you use it by adding "noise words", "recoding" replacement words and constantly evolving your company Smart Text database. You can also customize the look and feel and quickly share across your organization with our integrated reportal and directly export to executive ready presentations. 

Call us today for a demo! 

We strive to constantly improve the value we provide, and turn customer feedback into actionable business insights. This year a group from the research team headed to the Burke Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio to explore report writing. Fun? Actually they all said YES! They attended "Writing and Presenting Marketing Research Reports: Insights, Storytelling, and Data Visualization."

The 3-day course covered everything from the basics of preparing an audience to advanced visualization and data presentation skills. After a lovely time exploring Cincinnati, the big snow storm hit, and it was clear that the thin-skinned Texans had overstayed their welcome. After thawing, the team came back energized, with new skills and a passion to take customer insights and research reporting to the next level - so get ready for some awesome reporting! (Yes, we are sort of research nerds here:)