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Illinois School Board Journal
March/April 2006

Biased survey beats unbiased for influence
by Bill Foster

Bill Foster is president of School Perceptions, a software company in Slinger, Wisconsin, dedicated to helping school districts gather and analyze data.

School board members constantly fight a tug-of-war between providing a quality education for students while being fiscally responsible and keeping taxes low. The debate over how schools should be funded and how much should come from taxpayers is ongoing.

As a school board member, you are asked to continue to provide quality, innovative programming for students, maintain facilities, and recruit the brightest teachers to assure that state and federal accountability standards are met.

No problem, right? All a school board has to do is hold a referendum and ask the community for more financial support. But how do you and your fellow board members know what the community is willing to support and how much they are willing to pay for it?

To meet financial challenges, school boards increasingly look for public support for spending initiatives. To gain that public support, in my opinion, school boards must master the art of community engagement.

If you were asked how to figure out what people in your community are willing to support, you would probably answer, "Let's survey them and find out." However, the process of building ownership in solutions and gaining support for a referendum includes much more than a traditional sampling survey. Today's version of community engagement must be ongoing, multifaceted, communication intensive and, above all, inclusive.

Traditionally, school districts have prepared for referendums by surveying a small sample of the population representative of the entire community. Unfortunately, this sampling approach leaves many people saying, "They never asked me what I thought." And as the rate of referendums that fail continues to outpace those that pass, school districts realize that this may not be the best approach to understand the community's priorities.

Allowing the survey to be biased by a single group of "influential" people is not only more predictive, it also leads to a more successful initiative.

Flawed from the start

The traditional survey methodology used in the past for gathering public perception data has a number of flaws. Rarely is any sample truly representative of the entire population. Traditionally underrepresented groups can be tracked down in a door-to-door census campaign, but it is expensive and time consuming to do the same in a community survey. Very few companies will go to this effort to assure you of a perfect representative sample.

Many surveyors focus on a singular behavior, such as voting, and by doing so often miss the bigger picture. If the purpose of your survey is to predict the outcome of a possible referendum, understanding voter ideals becomes essential.

Surveyors know that all people in a random stratified representative sample are not equally likely to vote, and will ask a number of questions to predict the likeliness of a respondent voting in an upcoming election. Doing so misses a host of other influential behaviors these voters may exhibit.

The ‘influentials'

Not everyone's influence is equal. New research shows a small number of people have a great deal of influence over what others think and how others behave. It follows that these same people also have a great deal of influence over how others vote.

Ed Keller, author of The Influentials, notes, "One American in 10 tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy. They are the influentials." He then goes on to document the impact this small number of people have on the perceptions of others. A random sample, even if it is perfectly representative of the community, does not take this group into account. By doing so your school district will not only have a flaw in the predictive nature of your data, but you may also miss a great opportunity to garner support for your initiative.

Finding the Golden Goose

Once you realize you must understand and target the influentials in the community, the emphasis in a successful initiative quickly shifts from "Does this small group of influential people exist?" to "Who are they?" and "What are they saying?" Identifying the influential few within your school community can be done in a number of ways. Anecdotally, many of you could probably jot down a name or two right now that would fit within the group, but a more research-based and measured approach is a wise choice here.

It is important to note that this influential group is not necessarily the same group of "squeaky wheels" that are vocal at your school board meetings. These individuals, although they are active in their communities, are much more likely to talk to 10 of their friends about an important issue than they are to speak out at a public meeting. That is precisely why measuring their perceptions and garnering their support is so essential to your success.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestseller The Tipping Point, shows clear and distinct differences between the people he calls "connectors" and those who are not: "Sprinkled among every walk of life are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are connectors."

There are a number of characteristics these influential people have in common, including community activism, volunteerism, leadership skills, computer skills, well informed, and inclusion in multiple organized groups across organizational type.

Surveying smart

School districts that will be on the leading edge of educational improvement will be those that can not only measure the perceptions of the influentials in their community, but can also gain and use their support. For this to happen, you need to accomplish two important tasks: Ask them what they think and educate them on your issues.

The first task seems simple enough — most surveys ask people what they think. The problem is that a typical random survey may only reach 2 to 4 percent of the community. With this strategy, you will miss most of the influentials in your community.

A better approach is to give everyone in your community an opportunity to participate in the survey process. The influentials, by their nature, will rise to the task. Ed Keller, a nationally recognized expert on marketing and consumer trends, has research that shows this group of influential connectors is 56 percent more likely than the general population to express their opinions to public officials and 30 percent more likely than the general population to try to influence public policy with their opinions.

A survey that is available to everyone in your school community will automatically be biased toward this select group. Fortunately, this group is also the group most likely to vote in a local election or referendum. More importantly, each of these survey respondents can affect the opinions of dozens of other community members who did not respond to your survey.

The real advantage of using an inclusive survey model is that you are educating all of the influentials in your school community about the issues. Is this type of survey biased toward a select group of influential people? Yes. Is it important that these people are well-informed about the advantages of your initiative? Yes — very important.

Why would you go through the trouble, time and expense of surveying a random, small sample of your community knowing that you are missing many of the influential people in your school district? A better method is to create an inclusive survey that allows every member of your school community, including all of the influentials, to not only tell you what they think, but to learn about your issues. The result is a group of highly active advocates in your community influencing others in support of your initiative.

In the end, successful community engagement involves much more than surveying the community and understanding the vital role of the influential. It requires strong leadership, relationship building and an ongoing communication strategy educating people about the facts.

While there is no guarantee that a referendum will pass or the school board's financial tug-of-war will get easier, starting off on the right foot by conducting an inclusive survey, followed by a cohesive communication strategy to communicate the facts and results, will definitely increase the chances of success.