Inquisite Surveys Help Elon University Cut In-House Costs and Improve Student Programs

Inquisite at Elon University

Elon University has been an avid Inquisite customer, using Inquisite to conduct two types of surveys – satisfaction and student participation. The programs and services offered at Elon University are always being evaluated. "We want to know how well we are providing services to our students. We want feedback about various things such as the food we serve, how well our orientations are presented, and the satisfaction level of our advising", said Robert Springer, Director – Institutional Research. "We also want to know how frequently the students engage in the programs and events that the university offers."

Business Challenge

Prior to using Inquisite, Springer's department used in house paper surveys. During this time, the office was a one person operation. Creating and conducting surveys was extremely time consuming and inefficient. They wanted to find a tool that would reduce the labor intensive paper methodology. However, the paper surveys were still going to be conducted occasionally. "We have a policy that web-based surveys need to be considered first before compiling a paper survey. Inquisite is time and cost efficient. It pays for itself", said Springer.

One of the major challenges was making sure that the paper surveys reached the students through the mail. Often, the students' mailboxes were full and something such as a survey would easily be discarded.

The other challenge was getting the students to return their surveys. Then, once the surveys were returned, the data had to be transposed into a centralized database. The challenge to this was finding individuals that were able to accurately transpose what could be 700 survey responses that were often three and four pages long. Students were often used for this task. As a result, erroneous data was often collected primarily because of human error.

How Inquisite Helped

Elon University recently surveyed 1600 high school seniors and received 1100 responses. If the survey had been done via paper, it would have cost nearly $2000 to conduct. The cost would include an initiation fee, a return survey fee, and a raw data fee.

"With Inquisite, we are able to analyze our results in a shorter amount of time: ten days versus one or two months. This year our response rate has been anywhere from 41% to 66% with a target audience of 60 to 4000 individuals. The 41% rate is abnormal for us. We believe this is attributed to survey confusion. We conducted a student life survey at the beginning of the month and then we conducted another survey at the end of the month. Our mistake was not differentiating the two surveys. Many students felt that they had already taken the survey and disregarded the second survey", said Springer. "We learned that we need to clarify our surveys within the subject line and also stagger the source of the survey."