Making online consultation easy
Features
1. Sign up panelists quickly and easily
We’ve made the sign-up process as simple as possible, to encourage greater participation. Once a panelist has provided essential demographic information they’re signed up and ready to go.
2. Create and publish questionnaires
It’s easy to create and publish questionnaires using Sonar. That means you can focus on what matters most – the content. Sonar gives you plenty of options when creating questionnaires, from deciding what kinds of questions to ask – multi-choice or open-ended – to nominating a time for polling to start and finish.
3. Create and publish reports
The best way to engage your audience is to let them know they’ve been heard. Publishing reports on the polls you’ve run shows your audience you’re listening. It’s fast and easy to create reports using Sonar – and they look great.
4. Produce great graphs
Sonar’s graphs look good and they’re easy to understand. You can graph your results using pie, bar or stacked bar graphs. Because they are clear and engaging your panelists are more likely to take the time to view the results.
5. Work in your favourite browser
All you need to use Sonar is a computer and an Internet connection. It works in all major browsers, from Firefox to Internet Explorer, which means that even if you’re out of the office – or a panelist is away from home – you can still get access to Sonar.
6. Keep your panelists informed
Consultation is a collaborative process. Your panelists are just as interested in the results of polls as you are. Sonar’s Homepage provides information about new polls, completed polls and published reports, and panelists can trace their polling history with the Mypolls page.
7. Let panelists change their own details
8. Display all responses
With each report you publish you can provide a link that lets viewers browse all the responses to the poll. This gives transparency to the consultation process, and means panelists can check their own responses – or find out what others have said.
9. Check for and remove offensive material
10. Send invitations and reminders
Once a questionnaire is ready to use or a report has been published you can let your panelists know with customised invitations. All it takes is two clicks and they’re on their way. Invitations are sent out in small batches over several days, to spread the load on the site. You can also send reminder emails to panelists who have not yet completed a poll
11. Easily manage panel details
Sonar lets you manage the details of your panel by providing tools for searching, editing or deleting information. You can also export information about panelists, such as the number of polls they have completed and their sign-up dates, as a CSV file. This allows you to carry out more detailed analysis in Excel or other applications.
12. E-government compliant
You don’t need to worry about making your site e-government compliant – Sonar does it for you. By supporting the New Zealand Government Web Guidelines Sonar lets you create a website that is equally usable for all users, irrespective of physical or technological impediments.
13. Good-looking and easy to use
Both the administration and the public websites have a clear and friendly design. Sonar is so easy to use that administrators can be up and running with minimal training.
14. Fully customisable
We can quickly and easily customise Sonar to meet your needs. Whether you need additional features, or you want the Sonar site integrated with your existing website, our team can do it for you.
Sonar information sheet
Great news! We have put together a PDF information sheet to make it easier for you to share the great news about Sonar. You can download it from the link below.
Sonar-eConsultation.pdf [1MB]Police wiki victim of its own success
Last week the New Zealand Police launched a wiki inviting comment and ideas from the public on the new Policing Act.
The response to the wiki was overwhelming with the wiki being suspended after 3 days of being open to the public. It’s fantastic to see the Police embracing such and open and democratic process. A brief look around the wiki quickly threw up examples of irreverence and satire. It’s disappointing that the public haven’t taken full advantage of the opportunity presented. Congratulations to the New Zealand Police on their willingness to engage the public.
Continue reading…New features - Likert scale questions and Spider charts
This month we have added two great new features to Sonar, Likert scale questions and Spider charts.
Likert scales allow you to gather subjective and objective information from your audience. Sonar enables you to easily create Likert scales of as many points as needed. A default set can be set to make creating your Likert questions quick and easy.
To display the answers graphically we have adopted spider charts (sometimes referred to as radar charts). Log in to the online demo to see how they work and try your own. We look forward to your feedback on these great new features.
New feature - Audit trail
To make it easier to meet the e-Govt web guidelines we have recently added an audit trail to Sonar. This enables administrators to easily see when a change was made and by whom. If needed these changes can be “rolled back” to an earlier version.
We are adding exciting new features over the next month and welcome your feedback.
Police wiki victim of its own success
Last week the New Zealand Police launched a wiki inviting comment and ideas from the public on the new Policing Act.
The response to the wiki was overwhelming with the wiki being suspended after 3 days of being open to the public. It’s fantastic to see the Police embracing such and open and democratic process. A brief look around the wiki quickly threw up examples of irreverence and satire. It’s disappointing that the public haven’t taken full advantage of the opportunity presented. Congratulations to the New Zealand Police on their willingness to engage the public.
Continue reading…New features - Likert scale questions and Spider charts
This month we have added two great new features to Sonar, Likert scale questions and Spider charts.
Likert scales allow you to gather subjective and objective information from your audience. Sonar enables you to easily create Likert scales of as many points as needed. A default set can be set to make creating your Likert questions quick and easy.
To display the answers graphically we have adopted spider charts (sometimes referred to as radar charts). Log in to the online demo to see how they work and try your own. We look forward to your feedback on these great new features.
New feature - Audit trail
To make it easier to meet the e-Govt web guidelines we have recently added an audit trail to Sonar. This enables administrators to easily see when a change was made and by whom. If needed these changes can be “rolled back” to an earlier version.
We are adding exciting new features over the next month and welcome your feedback.