It’s the holiday season once more. Family and faculty alike have had a semester to settle into the rhythms of academia, and you have a small breather between semesters. Still, it’s not quite time to relax before the new (calendar) year begins. Now is the perfect time to receive feedback through surveys from parents on your school’s processes to improve your funnel for next year’s recruits while retaining current students.
Before you ask your parents the first questions that come to mind, however, let's take a deep breath and plan ahead to avoid possible roadblocks.
1. Decide how you will use your survey results.
Don’t offer surveys simply because you want “data” for the sake of having more information. The first thing any survey plan should determine first is the survey's objective. By determining the survey's goals before you so much as pen a single question, you’ll have a much more targeted—and effective—survey.
2. Take a “sniper” rather than a “shotgun” approach.
Segment your survey's potential audience into small targets, rather than trying to craft a survey that answers every question you have of every demographic.
If you want to make your initial recruitment efforts better, for example, only survey families who are new to the school this year. If you want to work on your re-recruitment efforts, offer the survey to long-established families and legacy students. In this way, you will get more detailed, narrowly focused information.
3. Use short forms, not long(er) interviews.
In-person interviews are excellent for judging individual cases, such as when a faculty member or family decides to leave the school. For more generalized circumstances like a midyear survey, you’ll want to offer a convenient and shorter method of answer-collection. It’s not each participant's exact set of circumstances you want to analyze, but rather the broader picture within the general demographic. So, anonymous forms with clear, direct questions will serve you well.
4. Avoid leading questions.
When it comes to crafting your survey questions, be wary of accidentally putting answers into your parents’ mouths with questions that encourage one type of answer over another.
For example, let’s say you’re running a survey to evaluate your office’s initial recruitment procedure, particularly how quickly your fellow Admission Officers respond to applicant questions.
If you were to ask parents, “How well would you rate the admission office's response time to questions during the application processs?” then they might be led to offer a higher score—having been influenced by the word “well,” which indicates a more positive attitude—than is actually true.
A better question might be, “On a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being the lowest and 9 the highest rating, how would you rate the admission office's response time to questions during the application process?” This question bypasses the qualifying adjective “well” altogether, asking for the participant’s answer without nudging his/her response in either direction.
5. If possible, use a third-party vendor to dispense your survey.
Even if you assure parents that results will be completely anonymous, some families may distrust the confidentiality of a survey that the school runs. This will hamper the honesty of responses and possibly cost you valuable insights.
Using a third-party vendor can guarantee respondents’ anonymity far more thoroughly than any test your school might deliver, as well as offer advanced analysis and suggestions for how the results can be applied to your school’s culture and inner workings.
6. Understand the statistics and results generated from the survey’s raw data.
There’s more to statistical analysis than simply averaging responses. How will you treat outliers in the data set, for example? Will you count them toward the average, or merely exclude the most extreme from the final results as exceptions to the rule? When will you average the data set, rather than offering up the median? Do you have enough respondents to the survey to guarantee accuracy? If not, how will you adjust the calculations to make up for the lack?
All of these questions require a specific technical skill set to answer. If you’re going to get the most useful and insightful answers from your survey’s responses, understand ahead of time what sort of statistical analysis you’ll be performing and why you’re fitting the results to a chi-squared linear model or running your samples through a T test against a baseline population.
Discover where you stand through ISM's Parent Satisfaction Survey.
When it comes to your enrollment, your school is only as good as your community thinks it is. So retain current families, attract new ones, and evaluate your school's communication efforts by discovering what your parents really think about your school. Through this survey, parents will tell you what you're doing well, where you could improve, and how well you communicate your school's value to your constituents.
Contact Survey Research Manager Jenna Pingatore via email or by calling 302-656-4944 ext. 153 to find out more about survey customization and pricing.
Additional ISM resources:
The Source for Admission Directors Vol. 11 No. 6 Exit Interviews and Attrition Surveys
The Source for Private School News Vol. 9 No. 11 Find Out What They Think Before They Leave the School
The Source for Admission Directors Vol. 9 No. 2 Remind Parents of the Greatness of Your School
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 40 No. 12 Responsible Survey Data Communication
I&P Vol. 40 No. 4 A Guide to Responsible Survey Data Analysis
I&P Vol. 39 No. 15 Launching Your School's Survey Initiative
