Must Read Best Practices for Family Surveys

Your families' opinions matter!  

Distributing a family survey once a quarter or once every few months is important for the performance and growth of your centre. Parents wants and needs always evolve and you have to evolve with them.  

How Do You Set Up a Family Survey? 

Family surveys don't have to be complicated, firstly find yourself a free survey platform like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms - they have plenty of customisable options that you can play around with. As you already know, parents have very little time on their hands, make sure your survey is easy for families to do - don't make them write a whole paragraph, keep it multiple choice or yes or no questions. This will also give you a higher response rate when the survey takes less than 5 minutes to do.  

What Do You Ask in a Family Survey? 

Don't get too in-depth in a family survey, your families don't want to spend hours collecting feedback for you. Make sure your questions are age appropriate as well, no need to ask a parent about their child's literacy skills if they are only a new-born. 

Questions you could ask: 

1. Are you currently satisfied with the care provided to your family? 
2. What would you like to see in the near future? 
3. What would your child be interested in learning? 
4. What parts of your child's learning journey have you enjoyed? 
5. Do you think your child will be ready for school with the early education we have provided here? 

Additional example daycare survey questions 

How Do I Distribute a Family Survey? 

Distributing a family survey is probably the most difficult part of the process. If you ever heard about "The right time and the right place" - it's time to put this into action.  

Quick tip: With intuitive childcare CRM software, you can easily create and send or schedule your surveys to your families via email. Save time and track how many families have opened your email and follow up to the ones that have not opened or clicked the link. 

Who to send and when: 

• Take a quick mental survey of your current families at the moment, do they seem happy? Have they been bringing up any complaints? - You don't want to be sending out a survey if your families are going through unsatisfactory experiences (Covid-19, natural disasters, social changes), instead of productive feedback you may be coming across quite insensitive to their situation.  

• Best to send to families after a period of time at your centre (3-4 months), it's pointless to send to families who have just started as they have nothing to compare to. 

Family Surveys Boost Engagement 

Family surveys are an important business process that should be done regularly. Not only does the feedback improve your business operations and decisions but it will also give families an indication that you care about what they think. Any change that they can see is a step forward towards a satisfactory experience with your childcare centre. 

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