Lodeseeker™ is our online survey and reporting technology

Lodeseeker™ is not designed as a statistical package, rather it is designed to be

“an extremely user-friendly, accessible aid to all levels of User who need to access information in order for them to maximise the value held within it”

So often information gained from valuable surveys is locked within paper reports or Excel files. After our very first implementation of Lodeseeker™ in 2002, we were please to hear:

"I wrote a report in an afternoon that would have taken 4 days to write previously"

Our aim is to make the software as easy to use as possible - we believe that if we have to create a user manual, then the software is too complicated.

Lodeseeker™ is accessible via your browser through a login panel and allows different levels of access depending on your particular requirements.

For example, if you wish your survey recipients to see their own results, they can - and they can compare themselves with the whole survey, or a subset of the results, depending on how you wish to set the system up. In our case study, schools are able to access their own results and can choose to compare themselves to the whole County or, more importantly, Secondary schools can compare themselves with other Secondary schools, and Primary schools with other Primaries.

Results can be viewed with or without filtering on the demographics you set up in your survey - for example, if you asked for gender, location and ethnicity information in your survey, you can filter your answers using any or all of these. The demographics are not fixed - you have the choice about what you want to filter on, and this will depend on what your aims are when gathering the information.

You can choose to compare the results with the whole results (or some subset of the whole) or you can compare side-by-side - for example, you can compare girls with boys or location A with locations B and C. If you run the survey over again, then you can see changes over time - we have run the schools survey in Gloucestershire twice to date- in 2006 and 2008. We will be running it in 2010 and hopefully in 2012 so that we get a full cohort - that is, we ask year groups 4,6,8, and 10 to complete the survey, so by 2012 we should have the cohort that started as year group 4 in 2006 completing as year group 10 in 2012 - this will give us a very powerful set of data on which to base our statistical analyses and will give Gloucestershire Council a very powerful set of data on which to base their policies over a wide range of issues.

Data can be exported into Excel for further analysis, or you can cut & paste information into your Word processor or presentation software to illustrate your own reports. We can also create customised reports if you wish, as an optional extra.

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