Christian School Comprehensive Survey (CSCS)

Nationally-normed data on what parents students teachers ALL constituents think, what matters, and what to improve next.

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Gain Actionable Insights

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Avoid Bunny Trails

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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

We designed the Christian School Survey to help you avoid these pitfalls so you can grow healthier and serve more families.

mother taking a parent satisfaction survey at home
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Surveys Conducted
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Responses exclusively from Christian school constituents
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years of experience and refinements

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:

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
Graphical Executive Summary (NEW)
30k Foot & Granular Reports
Satisfaction by Demographic
Enrollment / Re-enrollment Status & Why
Marketing / Fundraising Volunteer Lists
Categorized Comments by Demographic
Leads of Actual Prospective Families
Testimonials
Close Correlates of Program Elements
Alumni Results
School as a Whole Report (3 total)
Survey Responses Raw Data
WOM Promoter Lists
Assessment of Curricular Areas
Splits/Divisional Reports (e.g. teachers, student)
Comparison Reports - Year to Year
New! Comparison Reports - Compare to Other Schools
Custom Questions & Survey Adaptations
Debrief Time by GraceWorks President Dan Krause
1 Hour
2 Hours
Up to 3 Hours

Standard Survey
$495

Standard + Splits
$745

Advanced Survey
$995

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.

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