Survey software for who-goes-to-whom
The org chart says Grant. The network says Mira.
One survey link, five minutes per person. See who your organization runs through — with data you can defend to a review board or a funder. Building and wrangling a 150-person study yourself runs $5,000–$20,000.
For anyone mapping how advice, information, and support move — in workplaces, organizations adopting AI, classrooms, clinics, locker rooms, and portfolios.
Ars Network is in early access. Our first pilots are in contracting.
The Problem
The questions your org chart cannot answer.
- Who is using the tools you bought, and who is teaching them?
- Who do people go to for advice, and is it the person they were told to ask or the person they trust?
- Who has already found a better way of doing something, and who else has picked it up?
- Which connections your program created, and can you show a funder the evidence?
These are network questions: not "what does each person think?" but "who is connected to whom, for what?" Your people can answer them. Almost no tool collects those answers in a form you can analyze.
What it costs in a generic tool
You could run this in the survey tool you already have.
Generic platforms are good tools built for a different problem. Here is what a network study costs in one.
The data comes out flat
Generic tools store one row per respondent. Network analysis needs one row per relationship. No clever question design closes that gap.
25 to 40 hours of wrangling
The typical cost of restructuring generic exports into network data, per study. At analyst rates, wrangling plus instrument design runs $5,000–$20,000 on a 150-person study — before you see a single network.
The instrument is on you
Wording, rosters, and follow-up logic decide whether your data means anything. Generic tools hand you a blank page.
How It Works
Three steps from question to clean data.
Launch a survey. Share one link. Get clean network data.
Build from a validated instrument
Start from a field-tested template or compose from eleven network-native question types — rosters, name generators, alter loops. Paste in your approved consent text, verbatim. The platform never supplies consent language.
Launch to your roster
Invite by tokenized link. One question per screen, WCAG 2.1 Level AA, save-and-finish-later built in. Launch locks your roster — the platform enforces your IRB scope, not memory. Your data is never locked away or discarded.
Export and analyze immediately
On survey close, download three clean CSVs: nodes, edges, responses. Straight into R, Python, UCINET, or Gephi. Zero wrangling. That is the product.
Who It's For
Built for anyone running a survey.
Especially anyone asking how information moves: who learns from whom, who relies on whom, and where it stalls.
Defensible from consent to export
Consent verbatim. A workspace we do not open. Exports straight into R or Python, the day collection closes.
Academic licensing available, with letters of support for grant proposals.
Repeatable instruments, client after client
Field-tested name generators and rosters you can rebrand and redeploy, client after client.
The export drops into your analysis stack — your margin stops going to cleanup.
See adoption, then act on it
Map who uses AI and who they learn from. Surface the advice network your org chart hides — then rebalance the load you can finally see.
Run it as a wave: baseline, intervene, show the change.
The method travels. Same survey, different noun:
"Who has shaped how you teach?"
Mentoring programs, teacher collaboration, student friendship networks.
"Who do you turn to for information to get your work done?"
Organizational network analysis, AI adoption, advice networks.
"Who do you go to for health information?"
Care coordination, referral patterns, community coalitions.
"Who do you look to when the game plan breaks down?"
Team cohesion, coach–athlete trust, performance staff coordination.
"Who sends you your best deal flow?"
Intro networks, founder support, portfolio connections.
"Which organizations do you partner with, and how closely?"
Coalition mapping, collective impact, evidence for funders.
The three templates
Start from instruments that already work.
Each template is a complete, validated survey instrument — wording, roster logic, alter loops, export schema. Starters ship with every plan; the full library comes with Team and Enterprise.
Advice Network
The canonical who-do-you-go-to study. Surface the informal advice structure your org chart cannot show you, from hidden brokers to overloaded experts.
Collaboration Network
Trace how work moves between teams and departments. Built for reorganization planning, merger integration, and cross-functional friction diagnosis.
Knowledge Sharing Network
For education and research settings: map learning ties, mentorship, and program-attributable connections across cohorts, schools, or professional communities.
Done-For-You Engagements
Want it run for you?
Some teams want the platform. Others want the answer. We run the study end to end — instrument, collection, analysis, executive briefing. One study, fixed price.
Ask About a Done-for-You StudySee It With Your Own Study
Bring your own question to the demo.
The fastest way to evaluate Ars Network is with a study you want to run. We will build your survey in the editor with you.
Request a DemoBuilt for Research
Designed around the standards research demands.
Privacy by permission
Our administrators can reach the database, because someone has to run the service. We do not open your workspace. Support access is switched on by you, and switched off again, and every action taken inside a grant is logged.
Your consent language, verbatim
The platform never supplies default consent text. You paste in the exact language your review board approved, and that is exactly what respondents see.
Accessible by default
We build respondent surveys to WCAG 2.1 Level AA and fix what we find. If something does not work for you, tell us and we will fix it.
Caps that never cost you data
We never bill per response or lock you out at a cap. Collection pauses; everything submitted stays safe and exportable. No surprise invoice, no held-hostage data.
Locked at launch
The moment a survey goes live, its roster locks — enforced at every layer. Need new participants? Duplicate as a fresh wave and launch. The right thing is the easy thing.
From draft to data in one launch and one download
Launch generates your link, locks the roster, starts the audit trail — one step. On close, one click downloads the bundle.
How to Read It
How to interpret a sociogram.
A sociogram is the map drawn from network survey data: every shape is a person, every line is a relationship someone reported. It looks like art, but it reads like a chart — and three passes will get you most of what it has to say.
First, size and arrows. The more people who name someone, the bigger their node and the more arrows point their way — those are your hubs, the people work routes through. Second, position. Someone sitting between two clusters, like the Product member in the figure, is a broker: the only path between groups, valuable and easy to overload. Third, the gaps. Tight clusters show where collaboration is strong; empty space between them shows silos; a node with no lines at all is an isolate worth asking about.
The map is only as trustworthy as the data underneath it. That is the part Ars Network is built to get right — carefully worded questions, person by person and tie by tie — so the sociogram you draw in R, Python, or any network tool starts from data you can defend.
Six Terms, Plainly
- Node
- A person, team, or organization in the network. Your roster defines the nodes; respondent attributes (role, department, tenure) become node data.
- Tie (or edge)
- A relationship between two nodes: advice, collaboration, learning, trust. Each tie is one row in your edge list, with its own attributes like frequency or strength.
- Centrality
- How connected someone is. People with high centrality are hubs: information reaches them fast, and losing them hurts. Several variants exist; degree centrality simply counts connections.
- Broker
- Someone who bridges otherwise disconnected groups. Brokers control how information moves between clusters, which makes them both valuable and overloaded.
- Super connector vs. one-off
- A super connector draws many people back, repeatedly — converging, thick ties. A one-off is a single ask: one thin line, sometimes a dead end. Frequency questions separate the two.
- Cluster
- A group of nodes more densely connected to each other than to the rest of the network. Clusters show you where collaboration is strong and where silos have formed.
Questions, Answered
Frequently asked questions.
What exactly is in the export bundle?
Three structured CSV files: edges (one row per tie, tagged by tie type), nodes (one row per person, with roster attributes), and responses (a column for each of your questions). Excel-friendly encoding, loading directly into R or Python (igraph, networkx, statnet), UCINET, or Gephi with no restructuring.
Does Ars Network draw the network maps for me?
Not today, and we would rather tell you that plainly than imply otherwise. Ars Network's job is the hardest part of the pipeline: collecting relational data correctly and delivering it analysis-ready. Visualization and metrics happen in your analysis tool of choice, where you have full control. Hosted analysis and visualization are on our roadmap.
Why can't I just use the survey platform my organization already pays for?
You can collect network-ish answers in any survey tool. What you cannot get out of one is network data. Generic platforms store one row per respondent; network analysis needs one row per relationship, plus rosters, name generators, and per-person follow-up loops. Teams that go that route typically spend 25 to 40 hours per study restructuring exports before analysis can start, and the instrument design is entirely on them.
How does this work with IRB oversight?
Three ways, all structural. Your institutional review board's approved consent text appears verbatim, because the platform never supplies its own. We do not open your workspace contents; support access is a grant you create and revoke, and it is logged. And respondent-facing surveys are built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which an increasing number of protocols require.
What happens if my survey hits its respondent cap?
Collection pauses, gracefully, and we never bill per response. Every response already submitted stays safe and exportable, and you can raise the cap and resume. Your data is never locked behind an upgrade prompt and never discarded. We consider that a non-negotiable property of a research tool.
Do I need to be a network scientist to use this?
You need someone who will analyze the data: a researcher, a data-capable analyst, or a consultant. What you do not need is a specialist to design the survey or clean up the export, because validated templates handle the first and the export bundle eliminates the second. And if there is no analyst on your team, that is exactly what our done-for-you engagements are for — we run the study and hand you the briefing. One study, fixed price.
Do I need a separate platform for regular surveys?
No. Multiple choice, rating scales, open text, and demographics are built in — every answer lands in your node table, already joined to the network. One instrument, one consent flow, one export.
And honestly: if a survey has no network questions at all, a generic tool serves you fine. The reason to run it here is when you want both kinds of data, joined.
Is this monitoring my people?
No. Ars Network passively collects nothing. Every tie in your data is something a respondent chose to tell you, under consent language you wrote and they read. If someone doesn't answer, their side of the map stays dark — non-response is respected, and it's a finding too.
Is there academic pricing?
Yes. Grant-funded and university research is why this platform exists, and academic licenses are available for individual researchers, labs, funded studies, and university sites. Academic and non-profit pricing is published, from $499 per seat per year, with a Grant Project Licence when a funder pays. We also provide letters of support for grant proposals that include Ars Network in their data collection plan.
Get Started
Have a network study this quarter?
We are onboarding a small group of first customers. One study, fixed price, no annual commitment — run it yourself, or have us run it for you.
Prefer email? sales@arsinnovate.com