Designing a
Communication
Survey

In today’s hypercompetitive school market, your schools must work hard to meet your community’s needs. But how do you know what those needs are in the first place? How do you know for sure that you’re not missing something—especially when it comes to communication preferences? 

A school communication survey can help you gauge your audience’s awareness of and preferences about your communication channels—whether that audience is your entire community or a small subset, such as your elementary school families. With the data a solid survey provides, you can not only learn how your community feels about your communications, but better tailor your messaging to meet their needs. 

Not sure where to start? Here we’re going to tackle five questions related to conducting a school communications survey: why, who, what, how and when. 

Why?

It’s tempting to use a survey to learn as much as possible all in one go, but strong surveys are usually built with one extremely specific goal in mind. Consider drafting a statement of purpose outlining exactly what you want the information from your survey to help you accomplish. You can start by finishing this sentence: “Once I have my survey results, I want to be able to…” 

The more specific your survey’s goal is, the more straightforward it will be to design. Some examples of purpose statements for surveys include:

I want to understand how and when families like to receive important district updates.

I want to help principals decide whether or not to launch a newsletter.

I want to learn which internal communication channels work best for classified staff.

If you have more than one purpose for your survey, try to narrow down the single most critical piece of information you need. You don’t want to risk muddying your data with conflicting or seemingly unrelated questions that will confuse your audience. 

Tiffanie Kinsch, communications and marketing director at Shawnee Heights Unified School District 450 in Kansas, recently conducted a survey designed to collect parent feedback about communication preferences. The survey’s purpose was to help her advise internal stakeholders—especially principals—about which channels families found most helpful. “I have some principals who write newsletters, some who do text messages,” Kinsch says. “I wanted to be able to provide guidance about what parents actually wanted and found useful as we figured out how to streamline communication across the district.”

Who?

The question of who should take your survey may seem simple, but choosing the right audience requires nuanced consideration. Most of the time, the audience for your communications survey should be a specific group of people with whom you want to communicate more effectively. For a survey about internal communications, it makes sense to reach out to teachers and staff. For an external survey about your district’s brand, it makes sense to survey everyone from parents to local business owners.

While it’s fine to cast a wide net with your audience, make sure to include some demographic questions so that you can disaggregate your survey by different populations. For example, knowing what school a family’s child is enrolled in will help you understand how communication differs from campus to campus. Likewise, asking families what grade their child is in will show you how a child’s age impacts their family’s preferences for parent-teacher communication. 

When presenting your survey to your audience, take time to explain why you’re interested in their opinions specifically. This way, they won’t misunderstand and assume the survey is intended for someone else. For example, if you’re surveying parents of high school athletes about how the athletics department communicates with them, say this plainly. If a person feels that your survey is relevant to them, they are more likely to take it carefully and seriously.

What?

Next, consider the content of your survey itself. What questions will give you the information you’re looking for? How many should you include? 

While there are many types of questions you can ask, they usually fall into one of three buckets: multiple-choice questions, open-response questions and scaled questions. Each has their purpose, and a good survey includes a mix of all three so that you have a wider breadth of data to inform your decision-making. However, it’s generally considered a best practice to include only one or two open-response questions per survey. This way, your participants don’t get bored or fatigued and begin skipping questions. 

One popular method for designing scaled questions is the Likert scale, which asks participants to rate something along a five- or seven-point scale. For example, you might ask your audience to rate the statement “I find my school’s newsletter to be useful” on a scale from one to five, with one being “strongly disagree” and five being “strongly agree.” Using a Likert scale allows your audience to answer with a bit of nuance without overcomplicating things when it comes time to analyze your data.  

Then, think about survey length. How long do you imagine your respondents will need to take your survey? Shorter surveys typically have higher completion rates and may be more accessible to busy families and teachers—but longer surveys allow you to ask the same question multiple ways to understand the answers more deeply. Finding a common ground between the two is a challenge; the key is to consider what is best for your community.

How?

The method by which you distribute your survey also matters. Consider what kind of survey experience would best help you gain the information you need. Would it be most helpful for your survey to take place on paper, through a digital platform, through in-person interviews or some combination of all three? Paper surveys are useful if you have your audience in front of you at an event or if they’re not particularly tech-savvy. Online surveys can capture people’s responses no matter where they are and may be the best way to reach busy parents.

Qualitative surveys, which prioritize in-depth written or verbal opinions over hard numbers, can also be useful for communications surveys. While quantitative data points are great for illustrating when there’s an overwhelming preference, qualitative data—such as open-response answers or interviews—lets you get into the complexity of the issue at hand in a way that numbers alone cannot.

When?

Choosing the right time to conduct a survey is crucial—especially for teachers and families, whose lives change drastically throughout the school year. The timing is also dependent on the purpose of the survey. For example, if you wanted to learn how families prefer to receive updates about course schedules, you wouldn’t want to wait until the middle of the scheduling process to send your survey. If you did, how could it inform your decision-making? Instead, you might poll families before scheduling begins or even after it ends so that their experience is fresh on their minds and can help you better design the process next year.  

For Kinsch at Shawnee, the weeks before school starts are a perfect time to share a survey intended to assess families’ communication preferences. “That way, families are thinking about school,” Kinsch explains, “but they’re not yet responding to whatever current practices their teachers or building leaders are using. You can get true preferences and not just specific subjective complaints.” 

In general, avoid holidays and periods of high stress, such as the weeks before graduation or right after school starts. If you’re not sure which times work best for your audience—or if you want to understand how opinions change over time—you can conduct a “pulse survey” by sending the same short survey multiple times throughout the year. 

Final Steps

Once your survey is out, the fun part begins. This is the time to watch the responses roll in, address any problems that may arise and prepare for the analysis. While we won’t go too deep into the final steps of your survey, we do have a few pointers:

Test your survey before you distribute it widely.

Having a group of administrators or trusted staff test your survey ahead of time can help you identify potential hiccups, like problems navigating your survey platform. You can also use your test group to get feedback about the survey itself, from its length to the wording of your questions.

Have a backup link ready in case of problems.

Even if you test your survey on multiple devices, someone will probably have an issue accessing it. If you’re sharing your survey via email, it could always end up in people’s spam folders or get blocked by a firewall. Have a general link ready to send to anyone who needs it or a QR code to display at in-person events.

Good tools make data analysis light. 

Chances are, you’re not a statistician. Thankfully, though, artificial intelligence and modern survey tools make basic analysis easier. AI—especially programs that pull overarching themes from massive walls of text—can be a great help in analyzing open responses, especially if you are looking for general trends. (For more on using AI in your research, check out "AI and the Future of School Communications.")

Even if the data is surprising, you can still learn from it. 

No matter how safe you feel your assumptions are, some part of your survey results is bound to surprise you—whether positively or negatively. In any case, the survey doesn’t change the reality of how your community or audience feels. It just illuminates that reality so that you can build a communications program that better serves your stakeholders. 

Put differently, a surprise is a good sign—it means your survey was definitely worth the effort because it provided you with new information. “It can be hard to face the feedback sometimes, especially when you’re inheriting systems you would have designed differently yourself,” explains Kinsch. “But uniting your district behind a plan that works for everyone starts with knowing everyone’s needs and opinions.”