It’s Time to Survey Your Parents

While the past few months have been challenging and far from ordinary, I hope your school has been able to continue delivering the quality education your students expect from a distance. This is an ideal time to survey parents at your school.

Importance of Surveying Your Parents

As you work to finish out the next few weeks of school, the end of the year is a great time to conduct a satisfaction survey since it gives your parents the opportunity to share their perspectives from the entire year. This year is no different.

One of the greatest influences on your school’s retention rate is parent satisfaction. When your parent satisfaction is high, your retention rate will correspond to this level. And, the converse of this is true—a lower level of parent satisfaction will correspond to a lower rate of retention.

In addition, it would be good to ask your parents about your shift to distance learning and how this is working. This perspective can help you prepare for the future.

Because of this, I believe it is critical to conduct an annual parent satisfaction survey. As a school administrator, you need to know what parents think about their experience. This will help you better understand the current satisfaction level and any issues that you may need to address.

Three Things to Ask on a Parent Survey

Every year I conduct parent surveys for schools of all types, shapes and sizes. While there are many questions to ask, it is important to ask the following:

Satisfaction Questions – It is important to measure the overall satisfaction score of your parent’s experience in the key areas of your school. These satisfaction questions help you to determine your school’s areas of strength as well as the areas that need improvement.

Plans to Continue and Graduate – One of the key measurements in an analysis of your school is your parent’s plans to continue their child’s enrollment next year and through graduation. You will need to understand if there are any issues that might affect the continued enrollment of your families.

Net Promoter Score – It is always important to ask the Net Promoter Score question so that the strength of the school’s word of mouth can be measured, whether in a comprehensive parent satisfaction survey or a specific stand alone survey. This score can range between +100 to -100. Typically, scores over 50 are considered to be strong scores and indicate a healthy school as well as a strong parent base for word of mouth.

These three questions help measure the health of your school. While these questions are critical, it is also important to provide a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions.In in

As you and your school’s leadership team plan to move into the summer, the results from a parent survey will help you to better assess the year and plan for the future. This should be a critical part of your evaluation and planning process.

You can certainly design your own survey, or you can hire a company to do this for you.

Through my work with hundreds and hundreds of schools, I have developed two surveys that I conduct:

1. Parent Satisfaction Survey – This survey is more comprehensive. It includes questions about satisfaction, marketing and the Net Promoter Score. Normally, the cost of this survey is $850. 
2. Net Promoter Score Survey – This survey is much shorter as it focuses on the Net Promoter Score question as well as an opportunity to suggest areas of improvement. Normally, the cost of this survey is $650. 

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