The comparison feature is a vital tool within the Engagement dashboard, enabling users to analyze data from the current project against historical data. For instance, it allows for comparing engagement survey scores year-over-year or benchmarking departmental data against the company baseline.
Use case
Consider a scenario where you aim to include comparisons with historical projects from 2024 alongside data collected in a 2025 project. Additionally, you wish to enable dashboard filtering based on the organization's Org hierarchy. You have configured the comparison in the Dashboard's Comparison tab, mapping it to the 2024 project, and have ensured the Org hierarchy units are correctly mapped as per our Support documentation.
However, when incorporating the comparison into your widget, the comparison value appears as a hyphen, with no data displayed.
Root cause & troubleshooting steps
This is a frequently reported issue. The root cause often lies in the absence of a connection between the primary data source (2025 project) and the historical data source (2024 project). To establish this connection, the system must be instructed to link response data across all sources based on the comparison field configuration.
To do this, you have to:
- In your current project, navigate to Participants - Tools and select “Update All Responses With Current Metadata.”
- Open the historical project used for the comparison and execute the same job, “Update All Responses With Current Metadata,” in the historical project
- Allow sufficient time for all jobs to complete.
Depending on the dataset size, this update may take several minutes to hours. After the job completes successfully, the dashboard data will be reindexed. If the comparison data still appears as a hyphen following the reindex, this may be due to dashboard cache and cookies. Logging out and logging back into your account and/or clearing cache and cookie should resolve this.
Summary
These steps serve as initial troubleshooting measures for comparison data issues in the Engagement dashboard and can resolve most common occurrences. Should the issue persist after completing these steps, please contact our Support team via your Customer Success Hub for further assistance.