When building that next great website for your school district, there are so many considerations that go into making it effective. Fresh content, easy navigation, mobile usability, ADA website accessibility, and more. But before you address any of these, gain a full understanding by conducting a survey of your users.
Avoid the pitfalls that many districts fall victim to of “slapping a new skin” on the same old content. A new website and/or a new website provider is a golden opportunity to learn what your users expect, and it all starts with a school website user and stakeholder survey. While there are certain mandatories for every school website, you can nonetheless gain valuable insights into school website design by surveying your users.
You can download a Website User and Stakeholder Survey Guide here, but I’m taking this article to highlight some of the big takeaways to begin considering before you jump headfirst into your school’s next website.
This article and subsequent guide are designed to help you gain a better understanding of the website user communications needs of your school community. Knowing how, when, where and why your visitors use your website can yield useful discoveries that can help you in planning your next website. Your website team can use this survey to gain insights and confirm priorities you’ve made about the direction of your new website.
While parents are obvious key stakeholders in your school website, there are other key user groups that need to be included in your survey. Staff – both faculty and non-faculty, students, extracurricular groups, athletics, board of education and key community partners should all be included in your survey sample.
Your survey should be distributed to your target audiences and the users themselves who will be managing the content. Survey as many as possible to get the broadest and largest sample. In addition to conducting this survey, consider other forums, such as focus groups and informal meetings to gain insights and buy-in.
If rule no. 1 of any communications challenge is identifying who you’re trying to reach, rule no. 1a ought to be fully understanding who it is you’re trying to reach. Asking the right people helps. Be sure to include all of the following groups:
Once you’ve determined who you’re surveying, now comes what to ask.
You may be doing an excellent job of informing your users; you may need to work on it. Gain this understanding to know where you stand and then measure the improvements you make going forward.
NOTE: Some questions and answer choices may need to be modified based on your current website, your school’s unique circumstances and other factors.
By asking the right questions, you’ll learn too what kinds of topics your users want to hear about more. Your administration may very well have certain strategic messaging and content that needs to be served up, but you also must take into account the kinds of content – curriculum, assessments, counseling, technology, parent resources, etc. – your users want and need.
Once you know who you’re asking and what you’re asking, now comes data. You need to distribute, collect and analyze your survey results.
Links should be emailed directly to your survey participants. Set a deadline for submitting the completed survey, and use the built-in tabulating tools to organize and analyze your results. Once your results are in, put together a summary document to share with all who participated – your website planning team and all who responded.
By now I hope you understand the importance of really getting to know the scope and breadth of your user groups and role they play in designing a more effective school website. Getting to know and understand your user groups will infinitely help you not only build that next great website, but maintain it going forward. Your surveys, after all, are not one-time shots but an ongoing process that you’ll want to revisit in years to come.
So jump in, identify your key groups and start building your lists of survey participants. Then download the Website Planning Survey Question Guide to create your surveys. After your survey is distributed and collected, analyze and share the results with your planning team and the respondents themselves.