Best Practices: Increasing Response Rates

Suggested best practices to drive response rates

1. Make completion of the evaluation as mandatory as the technology and culture of your institution will allow for:
   1. Integrate the Course Evaluations & Surveys survey notification in the most trafficked areas of the LMS
   2. Remove the “Do it Later” button entirely or shortly before the end of a project
   3. Remove the “Come Back Later” button entirely or shortly before the end of a project
   4. If a Canvas LMS user -- Block access to course Gradebook until survey is completed
2. Make survey as efficient as possible:
   
   1. Reduce total size and time it takes to complete the survey to only the essential information
   2. Limit the amount of custom questions possible to be added by teachers and admins
3. Utilize a progressive communication campaign:
   
   1. Take advantage of all communication options and stack emails for maximum effect: pre-survey announcement, survey notification, non-respondent email, additional non-respondent emails -- Each progressive email should build upon the other for non-respondents
   2. Focus on the content of email with unique content for each message and try version testing to find the most effective respondent emails messaging
   3. For more detailed information, check out our Best Practices: Email Communications article
4. Optimize Email Communication Tools:
   
   1. Utilize Placeholder options in survey emails:
      
      1. Table of Surveys for Students (direct link to individual surveys)
      2. Table of Courses for Instructors
      3. Login URL (general link to Student Dashboard)
   2. For more detailed information, check out our Setup Email Communications article
5. Incentivize completion of evaluation:
   
   1. Give students extra credit for completion of the survey
   2. If a Blackboard LMS user -- enable survey in gradebook
   3. If Canvas LMS user -- enable points
6. Cultivate a culture of Evaluation success:
   
   1. Bring stakeholders into the strategy discussion
   2. Disseminate the institutional value of evaluations to instructors and administrators
   3. Monitor instructors’ engagement with survey results through Response Monitor
7. Utilize Course Evaluations & Surveys monitoring tools to uncover the best strategy:
   
   1. Watch the Response Rate Tracker often to monitor daily response rate activity and begin to correlate what might be different about higher response rate days than others and implement strategies behind those findings -- look for patterns and act upon them.
8. Increase access points to Survey:
   
   1. LMS -- Look for more access points in or out of course to add Survey Notification / Link
   2. No LMS -- Look for integration points within external systems to integrate survey to:
      
      1. Portals, SIS, REST API, Email Campaign