ResEdChat Ep 64: Utilizing Microsurveys in Residential Education with Paul Gordon Brown

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back everyone to Roompact’s, ResEdChat Podcast. I’m your host, Dustin Ramsdale. If you’re new to this show, this podcast series features a variety of topics of interest to higher professionals who work in and with college and university housing.
I am joined by the founder, the creator, the original host of the show, Paul Gordon Brown, who Roompact folks will certainly know. But we always like to bring him back to talk about a variety of topics. But the one today, about Micro Surveys and the role that they can play in a residential education program. So thanks for joining us, Paul.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, glad to be back. Glad to talk about nerdy things like software, and features, and things like that.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Because I guess that’s maybe the common undercurrent as we get into wonky features of either digital platforms or maybe how those technical feature sets impact the processes, the operations, and the strategy of residential education teams.
But, yeah, today we’re talking about Micro Surveys. So we’ll start with the natural beginning question I want to know, because I’m not sure if I know exactly, what exactly are Micro Surveys and how are they used?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, it’s a great question because there’s other features you’ll find that are similar to this in other software programs. But it’s just unique to Roompact a little bit. It’s actually a feature that’s been with us since the beginning. So Micro Surveys have been a part of Roompact longer than I have. And I’ve been there almost since the beginning.
But really, at their core, they’re quick, one question surveys that you can send out to students. And I think what makes them unique, because you can send them out via email, but you can also send them out via text. And so, they’re intended to be a very low-friction way to quickly capture information. If it’s a text message, you just text your response back. If it’s an email, it actually will have the response, either box, or if it’s multiple choice radio buttons, in the email, and you just click in the email, it doesn’t go to another page, fill out a form, click send, there’s none of that. It’s just an immediate, quick response.
So, there’s a lot of different ways that it can be used. The initial idea, and I think why it was there since the beginning, is Roompact, we were about roommate aggrievance, pacts between roommates. And so the idea at the time was, “oh, this is how you can do pulse checks with roommates.”
So that was really the initial intention. And since then, though, people use it for many different things. A lot of them still use it for that purpose. But it can be used for so much more. And of course, our software does so much more, that it’s not just a roommate check-in tool anymore. It’s a whole host of things, really.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I do really like that idea, the most micro of survey. If you could really boil down, what is it that I want to know from you and just have you engage with, because it’s that idea, you do have to take an action as simple as it is to respond. So it’s good to see, “Wow, okay, we’re seeing high levels of engagement of people giving us feedback, or answering a question, generating ideas about one thing or another. And that it’s something that it all bounces back to you. I guess you would hope to see it become just a foundational part of the team culture and the strategy that they’re utilized early and often. You’re making sure that you’re keeping that opportunity for a pulse check always at the ready.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. And that’s the thing, right?
So microsurveys privilege certain types of questions. They’re great for things that can be distilled down into a quick answer. Something that you want an immediate response to.
So the interesting thing about Microsurveys is, you’ll usually get most of your responses within the first 24 hours. Certainly within the 48 hours. You’re going to get it back almost immediately.
The other thing is, the response rate tends to be around 30 to 40% on average for most Roompact schools. It’ll depend on how you set them up, how you prep your students for that, what kinds of questions you ask. But that’s usually where it will fall is in that 30 to 40% range. Which, for certain applications, if you need a quick response and you want something that a good chunk of your students are going to respond to, it’s absolutely great for that.
But I think you even hinted at it maybe without even knowing it, you have to prep your students for it. So if you just sent one out of the blue, they’re going to be like, “What is this phone number? Why should I respond to this?”
And so a lot of what I try to educate campuses on is, you need to integrate it into your operations. So one of the suggestions I give is, at a first floor meeting, when the community is being introduced, share out the phone number saying, “Hey, after this meeting you’ll get a survey asking how your move-in experience went, or some aspect of maybe beginning the school year, that is from housing, so know that that’s legitimate, not spam. And this helps us improve things.”
So even if you do something little like that to prep them, then that gets them some mode to expect it and to understand what it is. And so, enculturating that, is going to get you better quality responses. It’s going to get you more likely to have responses. You have to do that little prep work because some schools will just jump right in the middle of a term with this question and students are like, “What is this? I don’t know what’s going on.”
So you have to think about it as, what’s our plan, right, for the year, how to introduce it, how to keep going with it, things like that. That’s what’s going to make it most effective for people.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s well-founded skepticism or confusion and all that. You want to try to alleviate that as much as possible. And I think, yeah, that’s good advice to just start with that culture=building, in a sense of just saying like, “Hey, giving you a little bit of a notice here. This is going to be happening. We’d love to hear from you, and this is why. This is what we’re going to do with it,” and all of that. Versus just assuming that people will just get it, or respond, no questions asked, whatever. Some people may, and that’s great, but it is one of those opportunities if you can get a really good level of response, a little really good pulse check with the feedback and everything, the more, the better.
So certainly, I think that was a big application that you explained. And the best way to go about it of asking residents, “How was your move-in experience? How was your roommate conflict mediation?,” or something. An event occurs, you can immediately follow up to the folks who were involved in it to get their feedback. And I think a lot of people would be familiar with it, because I think a lot of apps these days always have little popups or in-app notifications of some sort that are seeking that information.
Are there any other applications of Micro Surveys in the residents’ education context that you could think of that you want to share?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah, certainly. So, I took a look at all the questions that people ever asked and I tried to categorize them. I’ll include in the show notes a link out that gives you some examples. They’re anonymized, but it’ll give you examples of things.
But there is a lot of checking-in at the beginning of the term, particularly, “How are things going with your roommate?,” or, “How did move-in go?”
Sometimes we’ll see student outcome questions. So, “Do you feel like your residence hall experience helped you meet other people?”
So they’re trying to look for are we hitting some of the outcomes that we have for our students?
Other times it can be retention, so, “How are things going with your classes? Is there anything that you need for help? How confident are you in your ability to manage time?”
So it’s looking for early retention risk indicators with that.
We’ve seen schools do satisfaction with housing, feedback on that, or feedback on programs and services that are offered. Or even proactive things like, “Hey, we’re getting rid of campus cable. We’re going to replace it with some streaming service. What streaming service would you prefer?”
So there can be those operational satisfaction feedback on program services stuff.
And then, we also see things related to housing for next year. So trying to get up, if you need some projection information. We’ve seen folks try to ask, “Hey, what are your plans?,” or “Break’s coming up, how many of you are intending to stay?,” Depending on how the school operates that. So there are also going to be some things that can be used in help with forecasting and stuff like that.
The final one really, though, is campus emergency weather facilities, there’s a pipe burst, trying to get out information but also collect information. And one of the things that I always tell schools, especially when it comes to texting, if you’re using the texting feature in Roompact, email’s a little bit more immediate. Roompact does not have an enterprise-level text account. So it is not like your campus alert systems when there is an immediate crisis and it needs to go out in a second. We do not pay for that level of texting ability, because it’s not really required. Most campuses have, well, I think all campuses have some form of that system already in place, right?
So ours becomes a secondary system when it’s an after the case or before, when you want it in a timely manner, but it’s not an immediate crisis need. So we’ll see things like, “Hey, due to the current weather situation that’s going to be impacting campus, are you intending to stay on campus or not?”
Or follow up after the fact, like, “There was a pipe burst down the hall. How many of you are staying with a friend, doing something else?,” things like that. So it can be used in those crisis emergency response situations, but more as a secondary targeted to residential students, timely but not immediate, tool for collecting things like that.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, those are some really powerful use cases. I really like that of the forecasting, like you mentioned. I think it’d be really helpful. And then, yeah, that ability of, if a crisis occurs, yeah, there’s other tools that are addressing, maybe, the immediate communication needs. But then, “Okay, we have resources available. How are we going to maybe just more strategically and surgically deploy these resources to the folks that need them the most?”
Versus just like, I can imagine with situations of a pipe burst or something like that, the idea, they might be like, “Hey, if you need something, just come down to the campus center and we’re here. Just come see…”
And then it’s like, okay, well you could send that to just the impacted people. Ask them, “Do you need help? And if so, what?”
It could be a yes and then whatever. Just things like that. There could just be some potential of, okay, well, now that you’ve had that triggered outreach to just the people that responded yes, let’s reach out to them, or connect with them, or whatever. It’s just an idea of augmenting the work that you’re doing, but also allowing it to become more personalized, more targeted, more specific to the people that it’s relevant to and those things.
But, I guess, to that point, if you just want to detail that a bit more, because I feel like there’s a lot of different aspects. And it feels like this is honoring the core of that we’re trying to connect with each resident, even just for this quick touch points and everything, digital tools are elevating this work to an extent, making it more efficient, and you can quantify everything. So I guess if you want to speak to any of those elements, that’s ringing with me from what you’re saying. But just how you see digital tools like Roompact helping to elevate this Micro Survey work?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. So, in terms of the messaging-related features in Roompact, we do have Message Center, which is for sending out messages to students. It isn’t necessarily for collecting responses, although they can respond and you can reply back. Message Center handles conversations as if they’re individuals.
So, if I send out a message to an entire hall, and then someone responds, I will respond back directly to that person.
What makes Micro Surveys different is that it collects all of the responses in aggregate, right? So you could download a spreadsheet of, here’s all of the responses. And then you can sort, and look through them, and say, “Hey, let’s take follow-up actions on these ones,” and things like that. Which is what makes Micro Surveys different from just sending out a message, even if it’s a question. It’s really that ability to bulk download it and then do something with it.
We saw a lot of experimentation with this during COVID times, peak COVID times. So, communication patterns were disrupted. You couldn’t necessarily do it in person.
And so, we did have a case study, Evergreen State College played around with Micro Surveys as a regular check-in. So every week, “Hey, we just want to see how things are going.”
And so. It wasn’t even necessarily something they were, per se, going to do with that data, although maybe they would look at it for trends of what are residents talking about? So they’d get a good feel of that. And there were certainly some particular ones that they would target for specific follow up. But it was also just an opportunity to connect and let students know, “Hey, we’re here. We care about you. Don’t forget about it. Even in these odd times when we’re social distancing and things like that.”
So, I think that’s where this, as a digital tool, feels a little bit different from some of the other ones, because you can just get that direct conduit. It’s immediate, there’s not a lot of setup. You don’t have to be like, “Follow our Facebook page.”
And then, “I hope you see our Facebook page,” and we’re beholden to Facebook for making sure that it surfaces it to you. And you’re also 20 years old, so you’re not on Facebook anyways, right? So it is not beholden to that. It’s a more direct plugin.
And there’s really not a lot that I’ve seen of campus tools that do this more broadly exactly like this. It’s also different in a residence hall environment, though, because you’ve got a contained population, as opposed to a campus where people are coming, and going, and doing various different things. You can just do much more, I think, cooler, targeted stuff, because of it.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. I’m thinking of the power words you hear, of the idea that it is supplementing and augmenting. And it is like this digital extension, I guess, that idea of even maybe during times when it’s the weekend, it’s a break, you can have, yeah, this ability to check in or keep connections alive. And yeah, so it just feels like very, like you said, a very unique and that ability to personalize and cater things to folks, is really just some powerful functionality. And I think it is something that feels like it would be just a foundational piece, like I said, of the culture of your community-building and engagement for the residence hall.
But I’m curious here to get a little bit more functional of advice you would give to folks around getting started. I’m imagining just knowing your deep nerdiness about all this stuff of just, I’m sure questions that people ask is like, yeah, should you try to do, “Okay, let’s do weekly,” whatever that is.
“Let’s make it as if it’s personal or something.”
It’s like, “Hey, howdy,” I’m like this person, or the mascot, or whatever. Just any advice, I guess, of whether it’s like, “Do this, don’t do that,” or it depends on just how you want to go about it.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. The thing about Micro Survey, it’s very similar to just straight up message texting. Is the more that you use it, the diminishing returns that you can get. So I’ll frequently look at school data and see, “Oh, you sent out this number of Micro Surveys.”
And it always, generally, not in every instance, will follow a pattern that, your first ones you’re going to get your strongest response rate. The next one gets slightly less than that. And there is a little bit of a diminishing return.
It also depends on the question that you’re asking. So if the student’s more motivated to answer because it seems more immediate, they will.
So if the question is something like, “We just want to know how things are going with your roommate.”
And you send it in November and a semester school, you’re going to get a low response rate than if you were to send it in September, when it’s more salient to them.
Or if you ask for specific things, like I mentioned, sometimes campuses say they want feedback on a particular service. If you’re hitting a nerve with that, it’s going to get a high one.
So, it does depend on what question you’re asking and what response rate you’ll get. So a good thing to think through is, “Okay, if we’ve got a limited number of choices of questions that we can ask, what are the things that are going to impact our practice the most? Are most likely to elicit the strongest, best type of response rate?”
And we can schedule those out. So you can actually schedule them in the software. You don’t have to do it as soon as, “I want it sent out now,” I have to do it now. You can schedule it into the future.
When it comes to frequency, the rule of thumb I give people is about once a month. That’s probably a good cadence. You don’t really want to go too much more than that, unless, let’s say, it was some crisis or emergency, something that came up, because that seems to be the sweet spot, that when I look at the data, that you get the better response rates.
The other thing to note, too, is just the way the microsurveys work is, once you send a question, it basically opens up a response window. So if you were to send a Micro Survey on one day and then a few hours later send out another one, your responses to the first one might get recorded on the second one, and it will throw off where your answers are going. So you also just can’t, well, you, technically can send them out in quick succession, but you really shouldn’t. So I always tell people, I’d say at least a week, and you’ll be very safe between them. But really, in terms of getting good response rates and not overusing the tool, think no more than once a month. That’s probably the best.
The other thing to think about is Micro Surveys can accept a bunch of different response types. So you can get a Likert scale, you can get a multiple choice. So those are just clicking on specific answers, or applying A, B, C or one, two, three. You can also do an open-text response to just take in whatever that may be. And I found that the ones where it’s a multiple choice or a Likert skill, you’re going to get a better response rate out of those.
Of course, not everything lends itself well to that. And maybe that’s okay. So if I’m asking how things are going with your roommate, do I just want to know things are great, okay, not so great? Or do I want you to have more detail in that? That’ll push you one way or another. But it can impact response rates. Open-text ones tend to get slightly lower response rates than ones where it’s a quick, here’s my answer, click, or A, one letter thing. Unless they’ve got feelings. Then if they’ve got feelings about your questions, then you’re probably going to hear about it, too.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Well, no, and I think that’s, it makes me think of, like, okay, if you see this, as it should be, as a tool in your tool belt, a suite of options of how you’re going to do outreach with your residents, it is super well-suited for, yeah, less frequent, maybe more quantitative questions and all those good things. And it’s like, “Okay, in addition to that, your RAs should still be walking the floors, and getting those anecdotes, and trying to get,” that’s where you could get that rich, qualitative feedback about how are things going with the roommate? And maybe you can also target who they might be like, “Well, I really want to make sure I talk to this one student because we sent that Micro Survey and they gave their roommate relationship like a one out of five, so I want to make sure I get in touch with them.”
So you could see them having some harmony, but then also where you’re just going to be like, “Okay, we’re definitely going to try to leverage this tool for this and then go about getting other information a different way.”

Paul Brown:
Well, and that’s the thing about something like responding with a text. There’s certain students that might say something in that venue that would never say that in person to a student staff member, right? So it just gives an opportunity to surface different information. Especially if you’re asking those retention-type questions and things like that, you can get different responses.
If I was a supervisor and we did a Micro Survey as like a pulse check, “Okay, beginning of the year, let’s set the stage, let’s see where people are and what this gives us something to begin, a place to begin.”
I’d be pulling that data. I’d be, “Oh, I’m meeting with the student staff member that oversees the third floor. Well then, let’s look at the responses together of the third floor. Looks like there’s a conflict here. Did you know about that? Have you seen anything? Okay, you haven’t, Rick. Great. Well then, let’s check in on that.”
So I would be sharing that data pretty directly, usually with those students staff to be like, “Okay, let’s formulate a plan together,” because this is the other data points that we can use. And that’s using the tool, right?
It could serve further assessment purposes. Maybe you want to collect that. Next year, you do the same question again, you’re able to track it through time. So there could be broader kinds of things so that you can look at those trends. But that student-level case management, working with the student staff on that floor to just make sure that students are getting what they need, is a key part about it.
So that’s the other thing with Micro Surveys is, yeah, you can send it out, you can collect the answers, but if you’re not going to do anything with it, you really need to think about, how do we integrate this into our process in a way that makes sense, so that it’s not just a thing we do and then never actually look at or take action on?

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I feel like it would be good, simple, concise insights to share during staff meetings or something, because it’s like, “Yeah, we sent out just whatever cadence of questions.” And just you could show every month if you’re asking the same question, that, or year over year, because we’ve made certain changes, we’re seeing that reflected here.
Or, “Okay, we asked, what’s your top complaint or something as a resident in this building?”
And to be like, “Everybody agrees, it’s the noise. Let’s try to do something about that, team.”
So yeah, I think that those are really good bits of advice of how best to leverage this, and then how to integrate it into your workflows, and everything, and processes, and all that good stuff.
So I think you’d mentioned before a resource, the analysis of quantifying all the Micro Surveys and stuff from your partners. So any other resources that you’d want to point folks to that we can put in the show notes?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mentioned the questions where I called examples, because some people just want to see different ways of formulating things. And that also allowed me to categorize them and figure out, “Okay, if I were to code these as what types of questions do people use it for?”
So I’ll include that, I’ll include Evergreen’s case study in there. And then, of course, training materials on it. So it’s not something that you’re using frequently. So, for a lot of schools, you have to be like, “Okay, how does this work? It’s not a daily feature that I’m using inside Roompact that I’m looking at.”
So we do have some training materials to help with that.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Awesome. Well, appreciate you putting all that together and sharing it all out. And sharing all that you did in this episode. This is definitely really cool strategy, and skillset, and tool set, and everything that you can develop with your team to utilize, and to help to supplement, and amplify your team’s efforts.
So yeah, just thanks for hanging out and talking all about it.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, thanks, Dustin. Always a pleasure.