What to Do After Your Parent Survey Closes

Here’s a common scenario:

1. A school runs a parent survey in October. 
2. The Head of School brings the survey results to the next leadership meeting.
3. After a few people inevtiably go down the “parents will always find something to complain about” rabbit hole, the group ultimately agrees that parents raised legitimate concerns and commits to making improvements.
4. The leadership team follows through and begins making or planning those improvements, some of which will take months or longer to take effect.

At a glance, this feels like an absolute success. School leadership asked for feedback, listened, and made changes. What more could you ask for?

Well, let’s run that same scenario from the parent’s point of view to see what’s missing:

1. A school runs a parent survey in October.
2. A mom who loves your school but has significant concerns or frustrations carves out 12 minutes to respond—believing her voice could make a difference.
3. Then… nothing. 
4. February arrives. Re-enrollment contracts go out. By now, the last thing mom heard about that survey was the confirmation screen she saw when she hit “Submit,” four months ago. Her concerns, if anyone even saw them, seem to have been ignored.
5. Perhaps she decides (with great hesitation) to give the school one more chance. One more year. Or maybe she starts researching her options again. Either way, she enters the spring semester disheartened, with one foot out the door.

So, what happened? How did a school that took the time to conduct a survey, listen to feedback, and begin making changes still lose this family’s affection, advocacy, and perhaps enrollment?

In this scenario, the issue wasn’t failing to listen or act, but failing to communicate. 

Silence is Expensive 

When you send a parent survey, you’re telling your families three things: 

1. Their feedback matters. 
2. You know you have room to grow. 
3. You want to hear from them where you can grow.

When you drop the ball on communication after a survey, you undermine all three of those messages. 

Now, let’s be honest. Some of the people who told you hard things are parents you were never going to satisfy. Every school has a few. 

But most of them are families who love your school, believe in what you’re doing, yet still have a specific problem or concern they want solved. 

When you ignore that feedback, the cost arrives in stages:

• Today, you lose their affection.
• Tomorrow, you lose their advocacy.
• Eventually, you lose their enrollment.

*Most* parents who feel unheard don’t get louder. They just leave.

(Side note: One thing I always encourage school leaders to do is to look specifically at the open-ended, improvement-focused feedback from their “promoters.” It can be very revealing to see that the people who love you most and are most willing to talk about you positively still have real concerns.)

Don’t Waste Your Survey

A survey isn’t free. Whether you built it yourself or paid someone to run it, you spent real time and money to get those responses. Being a good steward of that investment requires two responses: communication and action.

Acting is the harder one and deserves its own space.

This article is about communication. Schools often skimp on or skip this, and, unfortunately, if no one knows that you listened to their sincere feedback and took action, the impact can be worse than if you hadn’t asked at all. 

Four Post-Survey Communications

Here are four distinct moments when you should be communicating after a survey, in order:

1. When they hit submit. 
2. When the survey closes. (optional)
3. After you’ve uncovered key insights and developed a rough plan.
4. When you’ve made a change.  (likely several messages, not one)

When they hit submit.

Respondents need to know their answers went through. Your survey tool almost certainly handles this already. Confirm that it does, tweak if needed, then move on.

When the survey closes.

This one is optional, and the test is simple: how long until you’ll have something meaningful to say? If you’re meeting with the Board and can report back to families within a week or two, you could skip this one. If the leadership debrief is three weeks out, and the Board meeting is after that, and you know it’s going to take time to digest the results and decide how to act, send a short note within a few days of closing. It just needs to communicate “The survey’s closed. We’re grateful. We’re reviewing it, and you’ll hear from us by roughly this date.” 

After you’ve uncovered key insights and developed a rough plan.

Don’t skip this one! The first two are easy, but low-value. This is the one that starts building trust and making families feel “heard.” You may want to include:

• How many people responded
• Your Net Promoter Score (NPS), if it’s something to brag about
• What’s working according to the data. Take a moment to celebrate these areas and tell parents you plan to keep leaning into doing them well.
• Two to four areas where families showed you areas that are underperforming their expectations. Specifically, focus on the areas where you’ve determined you want to make a concerted effort to improve.

Other than possibly the NPS, leave scores out. Nobody needs the details.

Notice what you’re not doing here. You aren’t promising a new building, a new hire, or a new program. If you’re sending this email within a few weeks of the survey closing, you probably haven’t had time to make major decisions. You don’t need to make big promises that you’re not prepared to deliver. 

You just need to prove that the survey was read by human beings who took it seriously.

When you’ve made a change. 

The final, crucial communication may actually be multiple communications.

When you make a change, don’t assume parents will notice on their own. They probably won’t. And if they do, there’s an even lower chance that they will connect that improvement back to the feedback they gave during a survey that may have been conducted months prior.

So, tie it back to where it came from.

“We’re adding this position because you told us in the fall.”

“We’re forming a committee to look at the facilities because that’s what came through in the survey.”

Expect this to be several messages across a year, because your changes won’t all land at once.

Match the format to the news:

• Email for the fast, low-stakes updates. Survey’s closed. Here’s what changed.
• A Head of School video for “here’s what we heard.” Tone carries on video in a way it doesn’t in writing.
• A school-wide gathering for the big announcements, with something written behind it so the story can be forwarded to the spouse who wasn’t there.

What Good Communication Buys You

Do this well and your next survey gets a better response rate, because families learned the last one went somewhere. You also get better feedback.

Here’s one more I’d bet on (if I were a betting man): Good communication before re-enrollment season saves families.

A parent frustrated about something specific, who hears in January that leadership sees it and is moving on it, will very often sign the contract. They’re still living with the problem. Nothing has visibly changed yet. But they know it’s been heard, and that may be enough. What pushes people out usually isn’t just the problem. It’s the sense that nobody notices and nobody cares.

Make the Loop Shorter

Most of what I’ve described isn’t hard. It’s one more thing on an already full plate, which is why it doesn’t happen.

That’s most of what we built into our survey tool:

• Flag insights as a strength or a growth area while you read through results
• Generate a first-draft email to parents, built from the insights you flagged

None of that decides anything for you. It just removes the friction between insight and communication.

At Banner 61, we believe a good survey is one of the greatest tools in your retention belt. If you haven’t run one recently, or the ones you’ve run haven’t actually changed anything at your school, let’s talk before your next one goes out.

Keep up the Kingdom work,
– Jay