5 Things I learned from a Parent Survey

A few months ago, I was challenged by the folks at Orange to do a parent survey to find out how the children's ministry is connecting and partnering with parents.  Through their product Weekly, they made it super simple by giving all the necessary templates to create my survey in Survey Monkey and launch it out to my parents.

I got about 24% of all parents from birth to 5th grade to answer this survey by emailing about once a week to ask them to take the survey. It gave me a lot of great insight and a snapshot of how the ministry is doing.

Since I asked parents outside of normal weekly email to them, I was able to use Mailchimp's powerful list tools to remove the people who either didn't open my email or didn't click the survey link.  This allowed me not to spam my parents who are engaged and minimized people taking the survey more than once.

A  big boost to participation for this survey is I made it worth their while by promising to put them in a drawing to get a $50 Amazon Gift card, if they gave me their name and email address,

This one thing caused my participation to increase by almost 400%!

Here are 5 insights from the parent survey:

1. Sunday is KING. 

I don't know why I was surprised by this, but my question was "What’s the most meaningful way our church impacted your family?" I expected my parent classes or family events like VBS or Egg Hunt, but Sunday morning and their small group leaders won with an overwhelming 71%.  You can see the results in the graph below.

This tells me two things.  (1) My parent classes aren't having any effect and (2) I need to put the lion share of my time and resources into Sunday mornings and my small group leaders.

2. Parent Cue papers are not being used. 

Since I started serving at my current church, I have always sent home at least one paper a week with the parents to let them know what we're talking about this week and give them discussion starters with their kids.  When I've told first time guests about it, they're excited, but from the survey results, my parents don't really use it as you can see in the graph below.

To help parents use the Cues more often, I'm going to take the responses I got from the people who say that they do use it and use them as ideas. This may help parents who want to use it, but can't figure out how to put it into their family rhythm.

3. VBS is the most helpful, not coming to one is next.

I do a lot of events throughout the year to partner with parents.  Some are brand new like a baptism class and others are as old as the dinosaurs like Egg Hunt.  Since VBS is our biggest event all year not just for the children's ministry, the whole church, I wasn't surprised to see it at the top, but what was surprising was the second most popular answer was "I didn't attend one."

Not everyone attends my events and apparently about 20% of my parents didn't attend any of them! I know some who answered only have babies or are new, but it doesn't account for all the answers I received.  I find it interesting, but I'm not sure where to go from here.

4. Clear communication is key.

I try to over communicate.  In fact, I've gotten several complaints of sending too much email. (looking back on March I did) However, I would rather be accused of over communicating than under, so I was interested to see what is the most effective way to communicate with my parents.  Granted, since I told parents about this survey through an email, email may be skewed, but I think the data still stands.

If you were to ask me what are my two main ways of communicating with parents I would have said email and social media.  I just started texting at the beginning of the year, and as you can see, it's already the second most popular way to talk to parents.  I usually send one text a month because I'm just learning how, but the results here are fascinating and gives me permission to text more often. (without spamming them of course!)

5. Open ended questions are the best. 

At the end of the survey, I asked parents "What would you like us to know to help us serve you better?" The answers were varied. Some were glowing endorsements, some were telling us not to change, and a few pointed out things that we were missing.  As the results were coming in, I found myself scrolling to this question's answers to find out what the parents were really thinking.  The beauty of asking for their names at the end of the survey was the ability to see who said what and follow up with them.  For instance, one mom said we needed to provide better service.  I thought the answer was vague and I genuinely want to know what she meant.  Now I can go back and ask her!

Focus groups are great and I still do them from time to time, but you can't beat the scale and anonymity of a survey. I learned a lot from both tools, but the parent survey really helped me get a pulse on the ministry and where I should focus my energy.  

If you'd like to do your own survey, leave me a comment and I'll be happy to share the questions I used with you.