Event Studio: Stage 1 — The Intake
Describing your research goal — the first step in building a Signal Event
The intake stage is where you describe what you want to learn. What you provide here shapes the entire event design — dimensions, facilitation guides, and conversation structure. Time spent on quality input produces a significantly better event.
Accessing Event Studio
From the main navigation, go to Event Studio and click + Create Signal Event.
Choosing Your Entry Path
Event Studio offers two ways to begin the intake:
Voice — Savo guides you through the intake as a spoken conversation. Describe your research goal out loud and Savo asks clarifying questions to gather what it needs. This is the default path — useful if you prefer a conversational approach to describing a complex research question.
Direct Build — A structured form where you type your responses directly. Useful when you know exactly what you want to describe and prefer working through a form.
Both paths capture the same information and lead to the same six-stage process.
The Intake Form
In Direct Build, you'll see a form with required fields and an optional section.
Required fields:
What do you want to learn from your participants? — Describe your research question in plain language. Be specific: “I want to understand why mid-market reps in our northeast region are struggling to close competitive deals” produces a better event than “I want to understand sales performance.” The more concrete the framing, the more targeted the event design.
Who are you talking to? — Describe the people who will be in the conversation: their role, context, and relationship to the topic. “Mid-market sales reps with 1–3 years tenure, focused on competitive accounts” gives the AI useful context for designing facilitation language that fits the audience.
What kind of conversation do you have in mind? — Describe the type of conversation you're looking to have. This helps the AI determine the right interview mode and structure for your event — whether you want open exploration, structured profiling, episodic reconstruction, or focused information gathering.
Optional section:
What does your company/team do? — Brief background on your organization and its relevant context. This helps the AI frame the event appropriately for your setting.
Website URL — Your organization's website or a relevant product or initiative page, to give the AI additional context.
Documents — Paste or upload background material: industry frameworks, prior research, competency models, internal strategy documents, job descriptions, competitive analysis. The AI uses these to ground the event design in your specific domain. Once your event is complete, the Research Provenance panel will show how uploaded material informed each design decision.
Duration preference — Target session length, if you have a specific preference.
Non-goals — Topics or areas you explicitly don't want the event to cover. Naming non-goals helps the AI stay focused on what matters.
Submitting
Click Build it when you're ready. The AI uses everything you've provided to generate the event design across the remaining stages.
The AI determines the interview mode based on how you've described your event — you don't select it during intake. To understand how modes affect the conversation and how to describe your goal so the right mode is selected, see The Four Interview Modes Explained.
For a walkthrough of what happens after you submit, see Event Studio: Stages 2–6 — From Review to Publishing.