Education Survey

Surveys are used for academic purposes all the time. You probably jump to thinking about surveys being used for teacher evaluation forms and end of course evaluation surveys. However, teachers will build quizzes using online survey polling software tools. Using a quiz creator tool actually saves time because all the formatting and scoring are done for you, unlike traditional paper based test and quizzes.

The adoption of technology in classrooms has been growing. Teachers and professors know that they are competing for the attention of their students. Using technology to facilitate quizzes and tests gives teachers more time for planning by decreasing the time they spend creating quizzes, formatting them and grading. And because technology is becoming more and more present in the classrooms, your classroom may already have computers in it for students to take the quiz. Depending on your teaching style, creating take home quizzes that are basically polls online work too.

I remember when I was in school, professors would always complain that transferring grades from paper to their grading system took a long time. Not only was that a pain for professors, but as a student, I wanted to see my grades as soon as possible. With the added web polling or survey software benefit of being able to automatically send out emails updating students on their quiz scores. To me, that seems like one more reason to switch to online quizzes. If you're using web poll or survey software, instead of having to transfer grades form paper to computer, you need to just export quiz scores and import them to the grading system.

Not all your online poll software uses have to be for quizzes, however. I mentioned before teachers are competing for student's attention with technology becoming more prevalent in the classroom. Why not make a poll and use it during your next lecture? Opinion polls keep the classroom engaged and help to make your point.

The point? Don't pigeon hole education survey questionnaires to only being for sampling student evaluations and course evaluation surveys. They have many other applications to the entire education process.

When creating online surveys, survey writers have the option to select whether the survey should collect respondent information or will be an anonymous survey. This is an extremely helpful feature if you conduct surveys, which at times, require absolute anonymity.

Collect Respondent Contact Information Survey: If during the survey creation wizard a survey designer selects this option, all survey respondents will be required to enter their contact information, such as name, email address, phone number etc. Setting up which contact fields you need collected for your survey takes place when you're designing your survey.

If you need a contact field that doesn't come standard in the survey application, simply create a custom contact field. We typically see custom contact fields created for pieces of information such as employee ID, account name, membership number, etc.

In a survey with identified survey respondents, all respondents must verify their name and email before starting the electronic survey online. This ensures their responses are correctly matched to their contact record in your address book. If the contact is not in your address book their information will be added automatically. An additional plus for the Cvent Contact Database is that even if they do exist in your address book, if they update their information while completing a survey, it will be automatically updated for you.

Anonymous Survey: In an anonymous survey, respondents can begin the web survey without entering their name or email address. No contact information will be added to or updated in your address book - because it's not being collected. As you would expect, the identities of your survey sample are kept anonymous and no survey responses are matched to contacts.

How do you know which type of survey is correct for your survey research project? Here's a few tips:

Most students these days have seen an education survey or completed a course evaluation or teacher evaluation form after a class, but are universities paying attention to what the results of the survey data collection means?

Tuitions have skyrocketed, suggesting student satisfaction levels should have increased as well. Are universities aware of how poor classrooms, faculty, staff and administration ratings can truly effect the return on the student, and more likely, the parents' investment? Perhaps universities should consider this part of their own investment.

Universities should use academic surveys and course evaluations as indicators to estimate the likelihood students will talk about their school in a good light, suggest their school to a friend and even... the likelihood of future donations as alumnus. Schools can literally calculate the possible ROI of education surveys. Here's an education survey example:

A private institution of 2,000 students with an average tuition is $20,000 roughly equates to a $40,000,000 business. Why risk the losing the potential for even more down the line with a poor university student experience survey that student believe will never be acted on? How much would you pay to protect that size business and make it part of your organizational culture?

In the past, I've talked about how utilizing email alerts can help you respond quickly to feedback and close the feedback loop. Email alerts can be particularly helpful with sales lead surveys or client satisfaction questionnaires. Until recently, you could only set up one survey level alert or apply email alerts to individual survey questions. Now you can set up multiple email alerts with Cvent Web Surveys software tool.

How can sales and marketing teams use this expanded feature? Set up email alerts to directly send leads to the correct sales person by creating multiple alerts and setting criteria to follow your organization's territory sheet. In the email alert, you can sent what contact information to include and what message will be sent in each message. The custom message gives you the opprotunity to insert data tags including respondent's name, company and survey information. Don't limit yourself to just sending alerts to your sales people, sometimes you may want managers or other departments to receive these alerts based on other criteria.

Working on an educational survey or using a quiz builder? Add email alerts to let you know if students score below a passing on the educational survey questions. This helps you quickly identify who needs more work. You can still run reports to get each online survey respondent's answers, right and wrong.

I'm pretty excited about this enhancement. Like many of our enhancements it comes directly from customer feedback. Have a feature you think we're missing? Let us know!

Survey email alerts, also commonly referred to as triggered email alerts, are a must-have feature for online survey software. Why? So you can respond to customer or employee feedback from HR questionnaires to product evaluation to customer service surveys. Yesterday, I wrote a post on tips for listening to feedback. Timeliness in closing the feedback loop should be a priority for organizations looking to improve how they respond and implement changes in reaction to comments.


A common form for feedback collection is web based surveys. So it should be no surprise when I say you need to have email alerts triggered to quickly respond to customer questionnaire or employee survey responses. Not every survey needs triggered alerts and you don't always need them for every respondent, so Cvent's Web Survey tool gives you three options for survey email alerts:

1. Alerts at the question level. If a client responds to a customer satisfaction survey saying they are very dissatisfied with your product or states they are unlikely to renew their contract, it may be appropriate to set a task for their account manager to follow up. Follow up as soon as possible. I find the sooner you can follow up with someone, show them that you're listening and want to resolve any issues, the easier it will be to win them back. The longer a customer has to think about a problem and stew about the pain it's caused, the bigger deal it's going to be later - possibly a deal breaker.

2. Alerts based on survey score. Many people use online surveys as a lead generation tool, for many of those users scoring leads to help the sales team prioritize follow up is important. In cases like this, you may decide you want to receive an email alert when someone scores over a specified number on the survey to ensure the team is following up with the hottest leads. The same idea could be used for educational surveys where you may want to know when a professor receives below a certain score on teacher evaluations completed by students.

3. Alerts for a completed survey response. There will be cases where you want to know when someone completes your survey and how they responded. Be careful with this, when you have a large survey sample, you don't want to be receiving emails every minute to let you know someone completed the survey.

With Cvent, surveyors have the opportunity to send the survey alert to five people and include a custom message in the alert. If you're using survey question level alerts, you can have different alerts be sent to different people as well. Meaning, if you want your customer care team to know when someone gives good feedback on a call they had, but the sales team to know when someone is unlikely to renew, you can set the alerts up that way.

Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about Cvent Web Survey software features.

If surveying is part of your job (HR surveys, marketing surveys, customer feedback surveys, etc.), one of the best things you can do before you creating a survey - especially if you've never done a survey project before - is to learn from others. I always take surveys when I'm asked. I'll admit my draw to taking them is because I'm curious about what they're going to ask, but I also want to see what things they're doing right and what things I should avoid.

Looking at other people's surveys are a great way to get ideas for good survey questions. If you're focus is on customer satisfaction or customer service feedback, it should be easy to put your hands on other organizations' business surveys. After all, we're all someone's customer. This is the same with marketing questionnaires or product surveys. Every once in awhile, you should fall into someone's sample. However, if you're trying to get sample survey questions for an employee evaluation feedback form, staff opinion survey or other HR survey, the internet might be your best friend.

While it's easy to get question ideas from questionnaires in the same category as the one you're working on, don't discount what you can learn from surveys in other categories. Best practices cross over categories and someone creating a customer service survey can learn a lot from an education survey.

If you're interested in learning more about survey best practices, sign up for Cvent's free webinar.

I came across an education survey report this morning that looked at the relationship between college students and their universities. Last month, two professors from the University of South Alabama presented the findings from a survey conducted in the spring 2008. They surveyed 1,025 University of Southern Alabama undergraduate students. The survey research goal was to uncover the relationship between students' perceptions that they are customers of the university and their educational attitudes and behaviors. Their research found 52% of their sample perceived themselves as university customers. Those who saw themselves as customers felt more entitled to complain. However, the survey research found satisfaction was the true predictor of a student's educational involvement, not whether they believed they were a customer of the university.

More universities are adopting the student-as-customer (SAC) model and treating students as customers. But what does this mean for educational organizations? According to the survey research, students who hold SAC perceptions tend to engage in behaviors and have attitudes that are not conducive to being a successful student. Education surveys like this one can shed some light on the education process for universities that are trying to find better ways to engage with students to create a more satisfying learning experience.

You can read more about this education survey at the Society for Industrial & Organization Psychology, Inc. website.

Did you know there are 6 steps in the market research process?  While this process speaks directly to marketing research professionals, the process applies to HR, customer or education surveys as well:

1. Identify and define the problem.  Before you start any web survey project, you should identify the key issues you hope to be able to solve.  This step should also include clearly defined objectives.
    
2. Develop the approach. In this step, you need to establish a budget, understand influencing factors such as the environment or economy, decide on sampling and survey methods, and formulating hypotheses.
    
3. Research design. Designing a survey or questionnaire is considered the most important step in any survey process.  Question design takes a lot of thought and time.  We like to say, "If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out."  This means that if the questions are bad, the data will be bad as well.  During the survey research design, keep in mind sampling methods and data analysis factors you intend to use.
    
4. Collect the data. Don't forget to test your survey before to ensure you're fielding the correct data.  Thankfully, with the help of an online survey tool, this step is relatively painless.
    
5. Analyze the Data. The types of analysis you planned to perform on the collected survey data should have been decided in earlier steps, but after collecting the data you have to actually perform the survey analysis.  Analysis can be performed using survey analysis tools like office programs, such as Excel, or more advanced programs such as SPSS - the complexity of the questions will determine this.
    
6. Report, Present, Take Action.  The final step in the market research process is to present your survey research findings and draw conclusions.  While Step 3 is the most important because it defines the outcome of your survey, if you fail to complete this last step and act on the findings in some way, the previous steps don't matter. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this same process can be applied to any type of project: product evaluations, customer satisfaction questionnaires, public relation surveys, etc.  If you give each step the attention it deserves, each of your online surveys should be a success.

Using online surveys to gather business intelligence may not be always be an automatic instinct for your organization. However, customer survey questionnaires are in fact a great way to evaluate your competition and gather insights about the business value propositions your clients rate high.

If you employ surveys to prospects and leads who leave the sales funnel, you can discover even more valuable information about why prospects chose another product or service. Were their features better? Did they they prefer the competition's follow up during the sales process?

When creating a questionnaire for competitive research, it's important to set goals. As with all surveys, whether it's a business survey, customer service questionnaire, employee evaluation or course evaluation survey, you should always "begin at the end." Define what the organization wants to get out of the project. Setting a goal before beginning the questionnaire design will better guide you through the survey creation process.