Alumni Research – More Information About What I Bring to the Table

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FIRST OFF, THE BREADTH AND DEPTH of my experience mean I know what questions to ask and how to ask them. I take special pride in writing surveys that avoid two serious errors that are all too common in survey research:

  • Asking batteries of meaningless questions or questions about things outside your purview that you can’t do anything about anyway – which distract respondents from giving sufficient thought to the questions that really matter to you, and cause some to abandon the survey altogether. This in turn can compromise both the validity of the data and the representativeness of the alumni you wind up hearing from. And beyond the damage that’s done, you are then buried in data that is not only irrelevant but obscures the important findings.
  • Including badly written questions that do not measure the concepts they intend to measure, can not be answered accurately, or mean different things to different people – all of which produce muddy data that is flawed and unreliable at best…and misleading at worst.

AS WITH THE SURVEY DESIGN, my data analysis is also customized rather than standardized:

  •  While I know what correlations to look for in the data that will provide you with deep and actionable insight, I also look for anything unusual or unique in your data that might suggest a new line of thought or analysis.
  • I analyze the data not only by standard demographic variables such as age and gender, but also by all relevant attitudinal variables and variables that are unique to your institution (such as degree, school or college, alumni chapter or region, and anything that may be of particular or topical interest to you). You don’t pay extra for extra analysis. Comprehensive and thorough analysis is fundamental to what I do.
  • Even though the sample will be random, participation in the survey can differ demographically. Donors, for instance, are almost always more likely than non-donors to participate. Therefore, I weight the data to be representative of your alumni population by all demographic variables. Moreover, to ensure that the results are representative of the entire alumni body – and not just those with email addresses – I weight the data to be proportional to your total living alumni population. This eliminates any skew in the data by ensuring no group is over-represented or under-represented.

LIKE THE DESIGN of the survey and the analysis of the data, my report is custom written for you. And it will not be a collection of tables or a dense mass of figures you need to plow through and decipher on your own. Rather, it will be a narrative that interprets and explains the results, with graphs that illustrate the findings instead of obscuring them. And, for added context on key measures, the report will compare your results with the results from the many other institutions for whom I’ve done surveys (or a sub-set of your own choosing).