Designing a School Satisfaction Survey

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.

 

Should You Conduct Your School Satisfaction Survey on Your Own or Should You Hire a Professional?

 
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:

• Parents are often leery of being completely honest if they think that their answers to your school survey questions in some way can be tied back to them or their child. Even though you tell them it is anonymous, they may not believe you. You run the risk of getting watered down feedback.
• If you are doing this for staff – they will never be honest since they feel that this is not anonymous, and it will impact their job if they voice a negative opinion.
• Writing good school opinion survey questions is an art as well as a science. There is a skill in crafting school survey questions that can get at the underlying issues. You might be able to get there eventually, but you will find that this is taking more time than you wanted to spend.
• Analyzing school opinion survey results is another time-consuming task. Is this really where your time is best spent?

 

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

 

How Long Should Your School Satisfaction Survey Be?

 
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.

 

What School Satisfaction Survey Questions Should You Ask?

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.

 

When Should You Conduct a School Satisfaction Survey?

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.

 

What Should You Do with the Results of Your School Climate Survey?

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.  

Contact us and we'll answer all your questions on conducting a satisfactory survey for your school!