Christian School Comprehensive Survey - Prescriptive (CSCS - Rx)
Nationally-normed data on what parents students teachers ALL constituents think, what matters, and Prescriptive Reports & Videos down to a classroom level
Gain Actionable Insights
Avoid Bunny Trails
Sustain Excellence
Results you can trust - Starting at $495
We spent over $40,000 and two years to completely overhaul and exquisitely norm GraceWorks’ K-12 Christian school satisfaction survey offered since 2007.
A properly-conducted survey is the best tool to determine what constituents think. Unfortunately, many Christian schools use homegrown surveys that lead to common problems like:exquisitely
- False Positives: Thinking a low score is actually a good score because you have nothing to compare it against.
- Expensive Missteps: Misinterpreting the data and investing in programs or facilities that you believe will make parents more satisfied.
- Missed Opportunities: Failing to identify your promoters and potential volunteers, and your unique positioning according to parents
We designed the Christian School Survey to help you avoid these pitfalls so you can grow healthier and serve more families.
Key Outcomes of the Christian School Survey
Retain more Students
The Christian School Survey helps you retain more families by identifying how parents see the effectiveness and importance of program elements. One without the other is not enough!
Generate More Leads
Word of mouth is still the most powerful lead generation tool for schools. Our survey offers the essential insights required to promote spontaneous and intentional WOM referrals.
Differentiate Effectively
What do your parents care about most? What are your natural program strengths? The Christian School Survey gives you clarity on these questions, so you can stand out in the crowd.
Identify Volunteers
Our survey delivers a list of volunteers in 13 Categories who are willing to help you with practical marketing and fundraising tasks, such as serving on a taskforce.
Better Tuition & Financial Aid
Two vital questions for any tuition increase are: 1) Can parents pay more? and 2) Will they? Investing in a survey is cheap insurance against the cost of failing a major tuition / financial aid change.
A survey you can trust
In providing marketing counseling and support to our 33 schools in Northern California, it has been invaluable to start the marketing process by using the Graceworks survey. The survey results combine rigorous statistical evaluation with an instantly understandable quadrant displaying actionable data. All this is normed to 890+ other Christian schools across the country. This combination gives you data that gets administrators, teachers and board members moving in the same direction –– celebrating their successes and improving their weak areas. Carol Tilstra-Nash, Northern California SDA
What You Get with the Christian School Survey
This may be the highest ROI investment your school can make. If you act on the data, the survey will pay for itself many times over.
Schools find these insights particularly helpful:
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Graphical Executive Summary
Get insights at a glance, then go in-depth for more. -
Overall satisfaction and willingness to refer by division
Know how your school divisions are performing individually. -
Comments sorted by subgroup
Drill down on subgroups with stellar or poor scores. -
Normed data for key program elements
See how your Christian school stacks up against others. -
Quality gaps for all program elements
A straightforward approach to identifying problems. -
Impact of program elements
A precise measurement of the impact of each program element on overall satisfaction and willingness to refer. -
Re-enrollment status
Includes enrollment information on eligible siblings or congregational members not enrolled at your school. -
Thumbs up / thumbs down evaluations
A black and white analysis of each program element.
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Progress reports sent twice a week
A high-touch approach to increase response rates. -
Thrills / Chills / Frills / Annoyances
Get priceless insight with this short, graphical presentation. -
Lists of Promoters, Detractors, and Passives
Note: Promoters are 3-5x more likely to volunteer, donate, refer, enroll, and re-enroll. -
Lists of willing volunteers
Find out who is willing to help with marketing tasks and annual fund tasks (as desired). -
Ample testimonial material
Dozens (if not hundreds) of kind comments to use on your website, social media, print material, and more! -
Explanation of Detractor and Passive problems
Understand why unsatisfied parents feel that way. -
Alumni Series
An entire series of questions designed to measure the “long-term” impact of Christian education.
Plus, you’ll get:
- Leads from Promoters of other families to recruit,
- Suggestions for improvement from all respondents,
- Student survey data analysis – segregated from other respondents,
- Close correlates of each programmatic element, and
- Raw data for advanced work.
Feeling overwhelmed? That’s natural. Properly surveyed, your parents are a deep well of priceless insight.
Rest assured though, the survey results are easy to understand. Additionally, Daniel Krause (President of GraceWorks Ministries) includes debrief time with every survey. You’ll have an opportunity to ask questions and get valuable insight into your highest leverage next steps.
The Process
1. Order Your Survey
Choose a survey based on your needs. Not sure what you need? Give us a call.
2. Conduct the Survey
You can focus on serving students and faculty while we gather responses, analyze results, and prepare a report.
3. Gain Valuable Insights
You’ll receive the Christian School Survey Report with helpful graphs, summaries, charts, and detailed data. We’ll also spend a few hours with you debriefing the results.
In my 34 years working in public and private education, I have never seen a survey with the detailed analysis like that of the GraceWorks Ministries. The one feature that goes above and beyond anything that I have seen is the analysis which breaks the data into 4 quadrants: thrill, frill, annoy, and fix. This kind of analysis is much better than any regression or other data analysis can display. The quadrants clearly and easily identify specific things that a school needs to improve on and things they are doing well. To distinguish between an “annoy” and a “fix” is also most helpful. Even though items that show up as “annoy” are not going well, they are not a priority for fixing. Working in a PreK-12 school, GraceWorks analysis lets me analyze my school from the perspective of elementary, middle, and high school and also on a grade by grade basis. Weaknesses and strengths can be clearly seen from any level at which we wish to look. The survey allows a school to analyze itself from a variety of program elements: leadership, teachers, Christian aspect, skills, curriculum, standards, appeal, etc. Using such data can help a school transform itself into the school it is striving to become.
Dr. Lonnie Laney (Ed.), Rose Hills Christian School, Ashland, KY (Dr. Laney has earned degrees in math, physics, and educational leadership.)
Christian School Survey Options
| Includes | Standard | Standard + | Advanced |
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Graphical Executive Summary (NEW) |
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30k Foot & Granular Reports |
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Satisfaction by Demographic |
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Enrollment / Re-enrollment Status & Why |
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Marketing / Fundraising Volunteer Lists |
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Categorized Comments by Demographic |
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Leads of Actual Prospective Families |
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Testimonials |
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Close Correlates of Program Elements |
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Alumni Results |
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School as a Whole Report (3 total) |
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Survey Responses Raw Data |
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WOM Promoter Lists |
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Assessment of Curricular Areas |
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Splits/Divisional Reports (e.g. teachers, student) |
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Comparison Reports - Year to Year |
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New! Comparison Reports - Compare to Other Schools |
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Custom Questions & Survey Adaptations |
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Debrief Time by GraceWorks President Dan Krause |
1 Hour |
2 Hours |
Up to 3 Hours |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.