Many schools attempt to solicit opinions about the design, usability, and general, overall impressions of their website. The most popular way to solicit these opinions is by sending out mass emails to enrolled students or alumni. However, there are a number of problems with this approach.
For one, just because students and alumni are or were enrolled in the school doesn’t mean that they use the website or campus – or at least the parts you want feedback on – enough to give valuable opinions with surveys, like those offered from Kiss Insights, that can help you make your school better. Second, you’re missing an entire subset of the population of your website traffic: parents who are looking up information for their children, guidance counselors who are interested in your school, and members of the public who are doing research or want general information. Email surveys also may end up in a spam folder and may never be seen by the students or alumni you send them to. Even if they are received correctly, the ball is out of your court and you can’t do anything but hope that a decent percentage of the emails are responded to within a certain amount of time.
There are better way to use online surveys to get feedback from students, alumni, prospective students, and other users who have a vested interest in your site and campus. Kiss Insights has survey tools that present one or two specific questions to users based on what pages they navigate on the school’s website. This gives more targeted control, and users are more likely to answer questions that directly relate to their interests.