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Los Angeles County Office of Education Quintuples Response Rate
"Easy to use graphics from Zoomerang [helped us] to quickly create a results overview report"
Bob Tyra,
Consultant,
Los Angeles County Office of Education
Recent examples include surveys such as:
- Identifying what students are doing after graduation (college, work, vocational school)
- Workshop efficacy - what skills were learned by students after taking a career preparation workshop
Bobs tips for a successful survey:
- Keep your surveys short! People are busy.
- Make sure you tell people how long it will take to take the survey and if you say less than 5 minutes make sure it really is less than 5 minutes
- Keep the response time window short no more than two weeks this helps train people to answer right away
- Dont hesitate to use humorone recent survey wasnt getting the response rate he needed so he utilized Zoomerangs reminders with a catchy email subject line: American Idol 200 million responses, our survey 38.
- Share the responses with survey participants people like to know how others have answered and how they compare
Bob Tyra, a consultant for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, decided he wanted to conduct a Customer Satisfaction Survey. The group Bob works for provides a variety of services to the support services professionals such as guidance counselors, psychologists, nurses, and school administrators across 81 school districts in Los Angeles County. Services they provide include legislative updates, mental health guidance and attendance review. The challenge Bob faced is that this type of survey had never been done before. Bob wanted to find out which services were most valuable to their widespread users and understand how to prioritize efforts going forward.
Bob convinced his manager, the Division Director, that a Customer Service survey would be a good idea. He had heard of Zoomerang and was convinced using an online survey tool would yield better results than standard paper surveys. Bob planned to launch his survey in February, which he knew could help get a good response rate. It would also make administration on his end easier to use an online survey as there werent a lot of resources available for this pilot survey and paper surveys usually entailed lots of collation time.
What they did
In February of 2003, surveys were deployed via email, county wide as well as people in Bobs own county office (over 4,000 employees). The survey was short, less than 10 questions, asking a few key customer satisfaction questions including information on which services were valuable, prioritization of services and how users best liked to receive services (workshop, email, newsletter etc.).
Their existing system meant that online surveys could take seven to ten days to build, and you had no direct access to the results, he says. So when he saw what Zoomerang offered, he was immediately interested.
Results
Bob was extremely pleased that the response rate quintupled over the typical surveys group had conducted in the past. Bob was especially gratified to find out that the group had a 90% satisfaction rating. This had the ancillary benefit of boosting team morale once publicized to the group. Even more importantly, Bob was able to take the survey results to various meetings and use the information to set strategy and agenda for the group. He notes that it was easy to use graphics from Zoomerang to quickly create a results overview report.
In fact, this original survey was so successful that other Los Angeles County education employees were interested in conducting their own surveys. Part of Bobs job is now training other employees on conducting surveys using Zoomerang.