<aside> 💡 We recommend that you approach building your gathers on Phoenix as an experimental and iterative process. This will avoid you eating up your Phoenix credits on gathers that are not ultimately useful to your work (more on credits in this section).

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Phoenix is built to make it easy to experiment and iterate on gathers.

• After you create a gather, but before you run it, you will be able to edit the gather.
• After you run a gather, you cannot edit it, but you can duplicate it to create a new gather that you can add / remove accounts, keywords or posts from. When you run this new gather, it will de-duplicate any posts or comments you previously gathered.
• Every time you run a gather, you will immediately be able to search the data you have gathered and see a simple dashboard displaying the data.

<aside> ➡️

Phoenix gathers can have errors! Sometimes a gather will not complete properly, and some data will be missing. We do our best to monitor and correct these errors, but you can help us by running a spotcheck of your data.

• We recommend that you run spotchecks by searching for data you expect to see and / or filtering and sorting data in the “engagement” tab of the dashboard.
• If you spot some missing data, please email [email protected] with the name of your project and a detailed explanation of what data is missing. </aside>

Some tips for experimenting and iterating on your gathers…

• Start with a small, experimental gather, and then build to larger, more complete gathers.
  • You might start with a small list of accounts.
  • Or you could start with a large list of accounts, but only gather data for the last 7 days or for a very precise (and relevant) period of time coinciding with an event.
• If you are gathering posts, we recommend that you start with a list of accounts, not with a list of keywords. It is very easy (especially with generic keywords) that you will end up with many irrelevant posts.
• If you are determined to use keywords for your gather, then start with more specific ones or with a very short time period to get a sense of what the keywords get you.
• Another useful strategy is to iterate with both account list and keyword list gathers to find what you are looking for:
  • You might gather posts for a list of accounts and realise they don’t discuss the topics you are interested in. You could then run a gather on a list of very specific keywords, and see what accounts show up, then add these accounts to your list, and run another gather to see if that gets you closer to what you are interested in.
  • Conversely, you might run a gather on a list of keywords for a short period of time, and get a lot of posts you are not interested in, but find that some accounts seem to be using the keywords to discuss the topics you are interested in. You could then create an account list based on this, and run another gather for that list of accounts.