This blog post is part of our surveying best practices series that we’re featuring during the summer of 2021. The series will highlight important lessons we’ve learned over the past 20 years.
At some point, my wife and I will buy our first home. Right now, we’re more than willing to wait. The last thing we want to do is jump on the bandwagon of waiving an inspection just to get a home that could need tens of thousands of dollars of work.
Frankly, that freaks us out. What if the foundation is bad?! We want nice floors, cool light fixtures, attractive cabinetry, a nice bathroom vanity, etc. And we’re determined to work hard to get them. But if the foundation is failing, then it really doesn’t matter how nice those features are.
I think about our eventual home-buying adventures the same way I do about surveys. If you haven’t heard yet, we launched our Key Measurements System this past spring. It’s a suite of more than 20 surveys that you can use throughout the school year to gather, organize, and use top-quality data from your staff, students, and parents. (If you want to know more about it, you should check out this short, two-minute video and take a look through this survey booklet!)
Every survey in there is ready to use right out of the box. In other words, the foundation is great. You could make no changes and still collect valuable, actionable data each and every year. In fact, we have districts that do just that.
But that doesn’t work for everyone. We know that some districts have specific questions, needs, concerns, and initiatives that aren’t captured in our base survey.
You can build off of our strong foundation—a foundation that allows you to construct longitudinal insights—with your own questions, perhaps from previous, in-house surveys or questions that are pertinent for one year (looking at you, 2020…).
We believe this is what makes us stand out from our competitors. We will never, ever treat your project with a cookie-cutter approach.
We listen to you. We work with you. And we can customize your project to meet your needs.
We’re never going to tell you that our foundation is what you need to build from. We can build new. We can add on. We can shift and edit and demolish and rebuild and whatever else someone might do with a home and survey.
Homes should be a little different. That’s what makes a neighborhood interesting, fun, and somewhere you want to return.
Let’s go house-hunting.
The School Perceptions Blog and Resource Center features the voices of our team members. This post was written by Rob DeMeuse, Research Director & Project Manager.