For Sustainability Consultants ·
What you'll accomplish
You ran a dozen stakeholder interviews for a materiality assessment and now have a pile of notes. Reading them all again to pull out themes eats a day. You upload anonymized notes to a regular Claude chat and ask for candidate themes, each with two or three word-for-word quotes and the note each quote came from, plus a list of points that fit no theme.
You then check every quote against your notes and decide the final themes. Claude's themes are a first pass for you to react to.
No Project is needed. For a one-off batch, a regular chat with an upload is quicker. If you code interviews every month with the same instructions, a Project may suit you better, as in the questionnaire guide at this level. For open answers from a survey form, see the Level 2 guide on Google Forms.
What you'll need
What you should see: A folder of notes with labels instead of names. Troubleshooting: If a note has details you cannot remove without losing meaning, leave that note out of the batch and code it by hand.
Controls differ between the web and app versions, so look for an attach or plus control near the message box.
What you should see: Your files listed with the message. Troubleshooting: If a file is refused, check Claude's help on uploading files for supported types and size limits. Convert to PDF or paste text if needed.
I attached anonymized interview notes from [number] stakeholder interviews, each labeled with a role code. They come from a materiality assessment for [Company A].
Propose candidate themes. For each theme give:
- A short theme name
- One sentence describing it
- Two or three verbatim quotes from the notes, in quotation marks, each followed by the note label it came from
- The labels of all notes that touch on the theme
Rules:
1. Quote word for word. Do not paraphrase inside quotation marks.
2. Do not invent or fill in anything the notes do not say.
3. After the themes, list "Points that did not fit a theme", with a quote and label for each.
4. Do not rank themes by importance. Do not rate any theme as material or not material.
Now argue against your own themes. Which two themes could be merged? Which could be split? Which quote supports the weakest link in a theme?
Open each note next to Claude's table. Tick each quote as exact, close or not found. Move themes around yourself. Write the final theme list in your own document.
What you should see: A set of themes with quotes and labels. Troubleshooting: If a quote is not in the notes, say so in the chat and ask Claude to withdraw the theme or find real support for it.
Re-run with a framework you choose:
Code the same notes against these categories that I chose: [list]. For each category, give verbatim quotes with labels, and say "no quotes found" where there are none.
Contradictions between groups:
Where do the plant staff notes and the executive notes disagree? Give a verbatim quote from each side with labels.
Questions to ask in the next round:
From the points that did not fit a theme, draft five open follow-up questions for the next round of interviews.
Plain-language summary for the working group:
Write a 150-word summary of the themes for a working group. Name each theme, include one quote with its label, and do not say any theme is more important than another.