Questions and Answers

Are the results anonymous?
Can I customise how Sonar looks?
Can I extract data from Sonar?
How many people can I consult with Sonar?
How many polls can I run with Sonar?
How many questions can I ask?
How much does Sonar cost?
What does Sonar look like?
What graphs formats can I choose from?
What support is there for Sonar?
What technological background do I need to implement and use Sonar?
What technology do I need to get started?
Where can I see Sonar in action?

Are the results anonymous?: Yes, results are anonymous when displayed on the public side of your Sonar site. Within the administration area all responses are shown with their email addresses. This allows you to contact panelists if necessary.

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Can I customise how Sonar looks?: Yes, Sonar uses an easy-to-understand templating system. Any competent web designer can customise the look and feel of Sonar. Or you can get us to do it for you. We can customise Sonar to match your current site, or we can develop a completely new look if you want to run Sonar as a sub-site or as a different brand.

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Can I extract data from Sonar?: Yes, both the poll responses and the panelists’ demographic information can be exported as CSV files from the administration back end. This means you can analyse the data more deeply using tools such as Excel.

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How many people can I consult with Sonar?: You can consult with as many people as you want to.

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How many polls can I run with Sonar?: You can run as many polls as you like, either at the same time or consecutively. The polls can be as simple or as complex as you like.

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How many questions can I ask?: Each poll can have as many questions as you need. When participants are taking your poll, it is split into pages of no more than five questions. Participants can save their answers at any stage and return to the questionnaire later.

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How much does Sonar cost?: You can lease Sonar on a monthly basis or you can buy it outright. Contact us at info@sonarhq.com for more information about costs.

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What does Sonar look like?: Sonar looks great. No, seriously the public side of Sonar can look any way you like and the administration side has a clean, modern look that makes it ease to use. You can see both sides of Sonar on our demo site, which will go online in early April.

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What graphs formats can I choose from?: Currently Sonar supports pie, bar and stacked bar graphs.

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What support is there for Sonar?: When Sonar is leased, support is part of the monthly lease fee. When Sonar is bought outright, there is a monthly support fee of 15% of the initial cost. This covers on-going technical support, maintenance and updates.

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What technological background do I need to implement and use Sonar?: None – we can take care of the implementation and train you and your team to use it. If you can use Hotmail you can use Sonar.

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What technology do I need to get started?: None – we deploy and host the site for you. If you want to run it on your own servers you can deploy it on a wide range of operating systems including Windows, OS X and Linux.

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Where can I see Sonar in action?: You can see Sonar in action at http://www.thecouch.org.nz. We will have an online demo available in early April. Sign up for our newsletter or send us an email if you would like to be notified once it’s online. We also offer no-obligation personal demonstrations of Sonar, either at your office or at ours. Contact us for more details.

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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.

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.