As we said earlier, there is an easy way to gather feedback from parents at your school by conducting an online survey. We’ve done lots of surveys over the years and we’re posting one here to help you gather ideas. Please feel to use any or all of this survey in your own school.
We usually use SurveyMonkey for our surveys – it is easy to use, even if you don’t have much survey experience. Our survey has some “skip patterns” which make it easier for the respondent to complete the survey by only showing questions that are relevant to that person. (For example, we were interested in after school activities – question 18 – so we first asked whether the respondent participated in the after school program and then if they did, we asked about specific aspects of the after school program. If they didn’t participate, we programmed the survey to just move on to the next item.) These skip patterns don’t show up on the PDF survey, by the way.
We learned lots of interesting things from our survey and it really gave the PTA leadership a sense for where they should allocate more time and resources. (For instance, it taught us that we should spend more time recruiting members and explaining the benefits of belonging to the organization to parents who haven’t been involved.)
We hope you’ll try a survey in your school. If you have any questions about it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us through the contact form on the website. (See the Help/Contact Us tab at the bottom of each page.) Good luck!