We recommend launching the survey September through November or January through early May. We most likely can accommodate your quick turnaround; however, there are two stages that clients might need more time than they expect. First, the PACE team requires a completed service agreement to start work. Institutions may need to run this service agreement by their legal department. The second stage, where clients might need more time — developing custom questions and providing a contact list.

Clients may add up to 20 custom questions. In addition, clients may also include up to 3 custom demographic questions.

We recommend leaving the survey open for a minimum of three weeks in order to gather as many responses as possible.

We generally send out weekly reminders when the survey is open in order to encourage participation. The reminders will only be sent to those who have not completed the survey. Respondents who complete the survey will not receive reminders.

Encourage the President or other member of your institution’s leadership team to send an email to participants prior to the email distribution of the survey to notify them that they will be receiving an email from PACE staff and to stress the importance of completing the survey. Our emails are sent from pace_survey@ncsu.edu. Also, we highly encourage marketing the survey among participants in as many ways as possible in order to get the best response rate (i.e., announcements at meetings, flyers on bulletin boards, etc.)

Your responses are confidential but not anonymous. PACE staff will not report whether or not you take the survey; however, each invitee has a unique link to access the survey. Your answers are completely confidential and will be released only as summaries in which no individual’s answers can be identified. When you submit your survey, your name will be deleted from the mailing list and never connected to your answers in any way.

Any variable with a response rate of less than 7 respondents will be excluded from the data provided to the institution to protect the confidentiality of respondents.

Open-ended comments are separated from all other survey items, including demographic questions and Likert-scale survey items. The institution will receive open-ended comments in the aggregate. There will be no way to connect comments to respondents. Additionally, PACE staff review the comments and edit as necessary to maintain respondent confidentiality.

Yes, the Part-time Faculty question set would only be administered to part-time faculty while all other question sets would be administered to all staff.

Historically, institutions score lowest on the institutional structure climate factor of the standard PACE. As a result, we developed the Institutional Structure question set to delve deeper into these issues. The questions on the Institutional Structure question set center around: mission, leadership, decision-making and influence, policies and structural organization, teams and cooperation, and communication and information sharing.

The PACE Survey team does not think a comparison between two administrations more than five years apart is meaningful.

In the report, you can select three comparison dimensions from our norm base. Most institutions will select their previous administration, the entire PACE normbase, and institutions of a similar size. When you select a Carnegie, IPEDS, or Census classification, your institution is already classified in each category by the information provided by your institutional research team. As a result, your comparison group for the Carnegie, IPEDS, or Census classification will be your institution’s classification. For example, if you are a medium-sized institution, then you will be compared to other medium-sized institutions.

Your PACE Climate Survey responses and personal details, such as your name, email, or IP address, will be kept private and protected. All responses are included in the overall reporting of the survey data. However, to protect your identity, when we report findings by group (e.g., personnel classification, gender, age), responses will not appear if fewer than seven people are in that group. If you write something in an open-ended question that might identify who you are, those identifying details will be edited to make sure your identity stays private. In rare situations, such as receiving a comment about harming yourself or another individual, we are legally obligated to report identifying information back to your institution.