There are two ways to increase total enrollment at your school: attracting new families and retaining your existing families. Schools spend a lot of time, money and effort in attracting new families, but retention is often considered an afterthought.
It is a lot easier to keep families than it is to attract new ones. And there is a significant cost benefit. Different sources
will cite different costs, but the standard rule of thumb that I have found is that it
generally costs five times more to attract a new customer than it is to retain one.
How satisfied are your parents? What is your student satisfaction? What is their risk of leaving your school? What parts of the school are
they satisfied with and what parts do they find lacking? The easiest way to understand this is to construct a school experience survey and
ask them!
Bill Gates once said that your greatest source of learning if from dissatisfied customers. Asking your parents their opinion, even if
you are a little nervous about what they say needs to be part of how your run your school.
A simple school satisfaction survey, administered yearly to both your parents and staff, will give you a wealth of information and allow you
to understand how the majority of your parents and staff feel about your school.
There are a number of free online tools that allow you to ask school survey questions of your entire school community. You can use Survey
Monkey, Survey
Gizmo,
or you can even create a survey using Google Forms. If you have the time and
knowledge, you can pull together a decent survey.
But this DIY approach does have some drawbacks:
It is for these reasons that many schools utilize Bright Minds Marketing to create their school satisfaction surveys. But, if you want to do this on your own, here are the things your should think about when crafting your school satisfaction survey
If this is your first time, there might be a tendency to ask too many school climate survey questions. Schools often take the “kitchen-sink”
approach in their surveys because the answer is interesting, but not really one that is actionable.
Survey Monkey recently published some interesting data about survey completion. They looked at surveys ranging from 1-30 questions from 100,000 users. This research uncovered some interesting insights.
This chart shows that the higher number of survey questions, the smaller amount of time people are thinking about the answer. Additionally, Survey Monkey found that the abandonment rate increased for longer surveys. Surveys that were longer than 7 – 8 minutes saw their completion rates drop by 5 – 20%.
Generally, we have found that around 25 questions is a good sweet spot.
This will vary by school, but the most important question to ask is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Net Promoter is a satisfaction
question widely used by private companies and universities. It is a simple question that was developed by researchers at Harvard.
It states, “On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend (your school) to a friend or colleague”. To gain your NPS, you break
your respondents into three groups. Parents who scored you a 9 or 10 are your “promoters”. 7-8 are passives and 0 – 6 are
“detractors”. To get your score, take the percentage of promoters, subtract the percentage of detractors and throw out the passives.
Voila! You have your NPS score.
Still confused? Let’s take at some sample student satisfaction survey results:
Top get your NPS score for your student satisfaction survey, plug your results into this formula:
Plugging in the results of our student satisfaction survey example, we get:
Which means your NPS score for your student satisfaction survey is 15!
Understanding how your NPS score compares against other schools is a bit tricky. Is a score of 15 good or bad? (Another
potential reason to use an outside consultant), but Temkin Group publishes yearly statistics on industry
NPS scores.
If you find that your score is similar to a cable company which generally scores around -11, you now understand that you have a
challenge.
Late winter is generally the best time to conduct a school survey. I always tell clients that the sweet spot is between Christmas Break and Spring Break. You want to give the new parents time to acclimate to the school and form an opinion, but you don’t want it to be too late when parents are thinking about summer and the next school year.
This is the most important questions. The raw results of your survey won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to interpret them.
Your goal should be to use the data from your school climate survey to plan for improvements for next year, and to track how well you are
hitting your satisfaction goals. Be very careful if you chose to not release the results of the school satisfaction survey to your
parent base. I always advocate that transparency on results is best, but only if you are also telling parents what your plan is to address
their critical feedback.
If you choose not to release the results, don’t be surprised if parents don’t answer your next school satisfaction survey, or assume that
the reason why you didn’t release the results is because the results are bad.
I hope that this helps you to understand the value of a school experience survey and why you need to do one every year.
Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email to nick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call us at 317-361-5255.
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