Christian School Survey

This is the most important question you can ask before conducting a survey. Bad data leads to bad decisions. That’s why we’ve collaborated with three statistical experts — Dr. Dick Carpenter, Dr. Angel Jiminez, and Dan Krause — to design and refine questions, comparisons, and analyses you can count on.

Typically 4-6 weeks from engagement to report. This can be longer for more involved Advanced Surveys, with many custom questions. The more customized the survey, the more difficult setup and scoring becomes. We will alert you if there is a delay for any reason.

We survey both parents – moms and dads. We expect a response rate of 40-60%. Incentives will be required to achieve this level of response. With over 820+ surveys, we have worked out a bevy of low- or no-cost incentives to get that response.

Note that this is the expected response rate for parents. For other groups, the response rate is typically lower.

The survey will work well with all constituent groups of a Christian school – teachers, board members, alumni, leaders, volunteers, donors, congregational members, and yes, even students.

For alumni, we have developed a set of questions asking them how they are doing in life. This can be a source of pride, but more practically – a source of more stories, testimonies, donations, and volunteer help.

Since the survey is electronic, questions are turned on or off depending on how the respondent relates to the school. For example, we do not ask past parents how engaging the teachers are – they don’t know. (Students should know – but we don’t trust their judgement!)

No – we have tried! The biggest problem with a paper survey is that respondents don’t take the time to deal with conditions. They answer questions they shouldn’t. More problematically, they don’t answer questions they should. The last school that tried a paper survey ended up throwing over 50 paper surveys into the trash.

Yes – the survey can be done in other languages, although often we do not recommend it. When it comes to surveys, “lost in translation” is a significant problem to overcome. Keep in mind that our survey hosting company, Lime, has translated their question instructions to multiple languages.

However, we will still need a translator for your questions. With difficultly we can find one, (an additional fee applies) but typically it’s better if one of your own translates the questions.

Generally from late October to early April. An earlier administration gives you time to fix problems during the school year, and can help you head off retention problems. A later administration gives a better read on what happened in the school year as a whole, allowing you the summer to fix problems.

Every year we do summer surveys. Incentives need to be carefully thought through to get the proper response rate.

The three biggest problems are (1) False positives assuming the answers are acceptable or positive when in fact they are problematic, (2) Mechanics of survey questions, and (3) The advanced scoring we can bring to your data – which you can’t – with over a decade of experience specific to Christian school satisfaction surveys.

We have over 3,200 hours of programming in our survey scoring software. Neither Survey Monkey nor anything else comes remotely close to our capabilities.

Yes. Much can change from year to year. Keep in mind that overall satisfaction is closely tied to enrollment numbers in two key ways: (1) More satisfied parents make more referrals, and (2) More satisfied parents stay in your program.

The bottom line – not knowing about satisfaction problems can in fact be very, very costly to your bottom-line.

Two items on the Christian School Survey are proprietary – the survey itself, and how we score it. Call or email us (719-278-9600, ext. 200, or dan@gwmin.com), and we will send you a detailed description of both. Or we will be happy to show you the survey via an interactive webinar for 30 minutes.

Once you purchase the survey, we are happy to send you a PDF, along with test tokens (numbers) which allow you to take the survey. We send you multiple tokens because the survey asks different questions depending on how you relate to the school.