We spoke – well, SoundRocket Research Consultant Julie M. Smith, Ph.D.; Research Programmer Rob Young; and Research Analyst Jillian Hunsanger spoke – at the 31st Annual Michigan Association of Institutional Research (MI AIR) Conference in Ann Arbor recently and, while they had a hoot of a great time at the conference, our three team members took their presentation on Maximizing Response: Practical Lessons from Campus Climate Surveys very seriously.
If you missed the conference you missed a ton of great information covering what Michigan colleges and universities are doing in the field of Institutional Research. But that doesn’t mean you need to miss the great insights, analyses and data (if we do say so ourselves) that the SoundRocket team presented. You can download the entire (free) PDF.
In the meantime, take a look at a short summary of two sections of their presentation, below.
Mobile Optimization: Help Ensure a Positive Survey Experience on any Device.
Ensuring that your campus survey optimizes well on mobile phones helps increase your response rate and completion rate (students can answer your questions when it fits their schedule), but mobile also requires appropriate care is taken so that your questions “translate” perfectly on any device your respondents may be using.
In recent studies we have found that often over 1/3 of the students complete surveys on a mobile device.
Survey device options are great! But…beware of asking too many open-ended questions because such queries can take too long when using a smartphone or tablet. Also, keep an eye on your survey’s length: questionnaires that take more than 20 minutes to complete are best suited for a laptop or PC, or studies where the survey taking environment is more controlled.
Creating an Email Strategy that Encourages Participation
Just like having a party to which no one comes (we’ve lived that nightmare!) putting together a campus climate survey to which few respond can be costly and discouraging.
To help ensure that you won’t be (to paraphrase Field of Dreams) building a survey to which no one will come, make sure you create respondent communications messages (invitations and reminders) that encourage participation. Inviting survey participation can sometimes be rocket science!
Our suggestions:
- Send reminders every four days. Too quick or too much time reduces overall response.
- Send messages from a person (from Dr. Jane Smith, Dean of Student Affairs) instead of from an institution or department.
- Keep messages short, but include important information – greeting, survey purpose, value of each response, confidentiality, survey length, incentive info, advance thanks, survey link. (Yes, it is possible to create such messages!)
- Communicate regularly with your IT department to help make sure messages get delivered (a box of donuts every now and then also never hurts).
What about subject lines, e-mail send rates, and the optimal number of contacts? Well, you’ll just have to check out the presentation to learn more. Yes, we’re a tease: the info above is just a sampling of the actionable strategies for great response to your surveys in our presentation’s PDF, which you can get your hot little hands on right now simply by downloading it.
Don’t like free? Don’t like to read PDFs? Prefer to send emails to ask us to reach out to you? We can do that! Email away!