Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Can our school conduct its own alumni survey? Why use a consultant?
2. Could we use Survey Monkey to conduct our alumni survey?
3. How often should we survey our alumni?
4. Who should we survey and when should we do this?
5. What types of questions should we ask our alumni?
6. Are consultants expensive? How much do your services cost?
7. What sort of survey response rates should we expect?
8. What are the most critical or necessary conditions for an alumni survey to be a success?
9. Will you share with me your alumni survey?  Can I see the items you use? 

1. Can our school conduct its own alumni survey? Why use a consultant?

Most schools do not have the personnel, expertise or resources to conduct an effective alumni survey. They do not know which questions to ask, the correct item formats to use or which statistical analyzes they should perform. When schools decide to do this work in house, the survey can quickly become much more work than it needs to be and never really accomplish what was intended.

Harford Survey Research (HSR) has been involved in a systematic program of alumni engagement research for over a decade. We have developed and validated the Alumni Engagement Scale (AES), and have conducted numerous alumni surveys of different types. We know the questions to ask, as well as how to best ask these questions. We are experts at survey research, psychometrics and statistics. We will make sure that your alumni survey is done professionally and that you obtain the information you need.

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2. Could we use Survey Monkey to conduct our alumni survey?

Schools do use Survey Monkey to collect alumni survey data on the Web. But they still have to design the survey, develop individual survey items and be prepared to analyze the data and interpret their results. If staff do not have this expertise, the survey is not likely to be a success.

Equally as important, Survey Monkey places limitations on the amount of written feedback that can be obtained, how quickly schools can begin to work with their results and how the school’s survey will appear. Alumni surveys that use Survey Monkey appear much less professional than the surveys we develop with Vovici.

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3. How often should we survey our alumni?

It really depends on what you are measuring, and how often you think these variables change. For instance, if you are interested in alumni attitudes, you might collect data on all alumni every five years. But this would mean that your older alumni would be surveyed many times over their lifetime, and it is unlikely that their attitudes would change that much.

If you are conducting an Alumni Career Survey, you could collect data every 3-5 years on alumni, but perhaps not on those alumni who are retired. I would suggest that you preload this survey with any information you already have on individual alumni.

Alumni profiles can be updated annually, but the collection of these data might also be triggered by a high number of bounce-backs in emails or mailings. When you are thinking about how often alumni should be surveyed, you have to consider what is being measured and who is being sampled.

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4. Who should we survey and when should we do this?

Here again, it is important to know why you are collecting these data and how your survey results will be put to use. You certainly want to survey recent graduates to update their alumni profiles and insure that you have their current contact information. You will want to know the academic programs in which alumni were enrolled, their favorite faculty, the dormitory halls on which they lived and the student organizations, clubs and teams to which they belonged. This information will help you bring alumni back to campus for their first and subsequent class reunions.

Within the first five years of graduation, you will want to begin to collect career outcome data on your recent graduates. This will give you an accurate picture of how well young alumni are succeeding at furthering their education, obtaining employment and advancing in their careers. You will want to periodically update these career data. Every 3-5 years might be reasonable, but alumni should know that they could update their profiles anytime this is necessary. It is important to keep this information up-to-date because it is used by schools in so many different ways, and you want to be able to objectively document the career success of your alumni.

It becomes a bit trickier when you are making decisions about when to evaluate alumni attitudes. Some schools will assess all alumni every five years. This is probably the most expeditious method for collecting these data, but it does have several drawbacks – older alumni will have been surveyed many times and likely stop responding to the survey. Similarly, many alumni write that since it has been so long since they were on campus, they are sure things have changed and their feedback is no longer relevant.

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5. We have never surveyed our alumni. There are many goals we want to accomplish - update contact information, evaluate alumni attitudes, collect career data and ascertain what alumni think about our magazine and other publications.  What types of questions should we ask?

It is best to keep your survey focused with a single purpose. Asking alumni to update their contact information, while at the same time evaluating their attitudes, presents problems. It makes very obvious that you know who is saying what, and makes it much less likely that people will complete the survey. When surveys serve multiple purposes or evaluate different many variables, the purpose of the survey is less clear to alumni and they are much less likely to complete their survey.

We work with our clients to prioritize their information needs. We help them determine what variables need to be evaluated and the best item formats for collecting these data. We strive to keep our surveys clear, concise and easy to complete.

If you have never surveyed your alumni, you might want to start out by asking about the quality of their academic, campus and alumni experiences. Start out by asking for their feedback. This can be followed by a call for alumni to update their profiles, the collection of alumni career outcome data or the evaluation of alumni interests. Some of these different purposes can be combined, but it is important to keep your survey concise.

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6. Are consultants expensive? How much do your services cost?

Consultants probably cost a lot less than you think. We use Vovici to develop our surveys, send invitations and collect data. It is a very powerful Web survey platform and offers us a tremendous amount of flexibility in how we collect data and customize our surveys. Vovici makes it fairly simple for us to design online surveys. Developing survey items, revising items and reviewing drafts of the online survey are all very easy for us to do. This allows us to offer a tremendous amount of customer service to our clients during survey design, and we do this at no additional cost to our clients. Vovici is a fully automated system when it comes to sending invitations and collecting data. We pass these savings on to our clients.

HSR develops a very professional looking survey that is fully customized and branded for your school. We are experts at alumni survey research, and we will insure that you ask the right questions, obtain the data you need and know how to put this information to work. We will make it much easier for you to conduct your next alumni survey and insure that your survey is a success.

When you consider staff time and the expense of hosting your own Web-survey, it is likely much cheaper to contract with HSR to conduct your next alumni survey than it is to try to do it yourself. Our consultants bring considerable expertise to the table. Give us a call. I am sure you will be very surprised at just how inexpensive your next Alumni Attitudes Survey can be.

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7. What sort of survey response rates should we expect?

This really depends on a number of variables – alumni attitudes toward the school in general, the percentage of alumni who participate in your annual campaign, the numbers of alumni on which the school has up-to-date contact information and email addresses and the numbers of alumni who attend events.

It will also depend on the number of survey items you use, how professional the survey looks, and the school’s history with surveying students. If this is the first time you have surveyed alumni, or you have a history of not listening to what alumni have to say, survey response rates are likely to be much lower.

Whatever your situation might be, Harford Survey Research will design a data collection strategy that will help you obtain the highest possible survey response rates.

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8. What are the most critical or necessary conditions for an alumni survey to be a success?

You need to have someone who knows what they are doing. They need to be experts in survey methods, psychometrics and statistics. You need someone who understands alumni advancement and can help schools use their survey results to build more engaged alumni communities and increase alumni giving.

The survey process must appear flawless to alumni. The questions need to be clear, meaningful and easy for alumni to complete. Too many surveys end up being a bad experience for both the school and alumni.

It is very important that you have a clear understanding of the purpose for collecting these data, how survey results will be put to use and have already secured the resources for accomplishing these goals. For the survey process to be truly effective, it must have the full support of faculty, staff, academic leaders and the school’s campus and alumni communities.

For an alumni survey to be truly successful, It is extremely important to share survey results with the alumni community. Share these results with the key stakeholders, academic leaders, boards and alumni. Make presentations and provide an opportunity to discuss results and answer questions. Publish these results in alumni newsletters, emails and magazines. Talk about your results on social media platforms and your alumni Web page. Make every effort to share your results with your alumni community, as well as to involve alumni leaders in putting your survey results to work.

Keep alumni informed about what you are doing with your survey results. Make every effort to show alumni that you listened to their feedback and are putting survey results to work. Make sure that things happen. When done correctly, alumni surveys will not only obtain valuable information, they will actively engage your alumni community.  

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9. Will you share with me your alumni survey? Can I see the items you use?

Harford Survey Research has committed a tremendous amount of time and resources to build our pool of alumni attitude survey items.  Our Alumni Engagement Scale (AES) is truly unique in its ability to objectively measure alumni engagement and predict alumni giving.  It has taken us many years of conducting interviews and focus groups; analyzing the comments alumni have written to the many open-ended survey questions we have asked and performing countless validation studies to identify what variables and items are most important to alumni.  We typically do not share our surveys with individuals or schools.  However, we do talk about our research, alumni surveys, the items we use and the results of our research at conferences, in white papers and on our blog.  These are very good sources of information. Our initial blogs have talked about our Alumni Attitudes Survey, our measure of alumni engagement - the AES, the models that have guided our research and the individual survey items we use.  We are developing a White Paper on these topics.    

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