2025-26 Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey: Survey Administration Timeline & Resources

Building a dedicated team on campus is critical to dispersing the workload of administering the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey. Change management in any complex organization can be difficult, and we have found that adopting a distributed leadership model has helped our partners reach a broader audience and make better use of the data.

As soon as possible, determine who your local team will be. Anyone receiving communications from COACHE related to survey administration should be added to your Survey Administration Portal under the "Contacts" tab. 

Resource:

• Module 1: Forming a Team
• COACHE Team Configuration Webinar

Any institution conducting the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey may receive a de-identified unit record data file in addition to the Chief Academic Officer’s Report and data tables. Your contract with COACHE stipulates that you cannot further disseminate the responses of any subgroup (e.g., rank, race, department, gender, or any combination of these subgroups) where the total number of respondents is fewer than five.

Institutions are not bound to this level of data disclosure and may opt, instead, to forgo receipt of unit-level data. If you are unsure about whether your institution should receive unit-level data, here are some questions to consider:

• In what ways must you analyze the data beyond what is already provided in COACHE’s institutional report?   
• With the knowledge that you cannot report subgroups of fewer than five, do you have enough faculty to disaggregate the data further than COACHE will?
• Do you have the staff resources (both in number and skill set) to spend time running additional analyses?
• Who would serve as your Data Administrator?
• Is the climate on your campus one where faculty feel comfortable responding to surveys when the institution receives raw data back?

If your institution would like to receive unit-level data, please confirm your decision in your Survey Administration Portal by Wednesday, September 3, 2025. 

If you have not done so already, you will need to upload a signed Statement of Data Confidentiality and input the name of your designated Data Administrator. 

Participating institutions may add up to 15 custom questions to the end of the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey. If your institution would like to add custom questions, please update your decision in the Survey Administration Portal by Friday, September 26, 2025. 

If you decide that your institution would like to include custom questions, the next step will be to schedule a meeting with Shabreena to work on developing questions. A link to schedule this meeting will be available in the Survey Administration Portal upon selecting "Decided - Yes" under the custom questions tab.

COACHE has a custom question bank to which partners can refer and which COACHE will share based on discussed themes.

Resources:

• Module 2: Considering Creating Custom Questions
• Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey Full Instrument
• Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey Instrumentation Summary
• Case Study: Tailoring a Survey for Campus Change at the University of Denver

Consistent and effective communication from the administration to your faculty, chairs, and deans helps to ensure a successful survey administration. COACHE encourages your team to develop a communication plan ahead of the survey launch and encourages partners to submit these plans via the Survey Administration Portal by Friday, September 26, 2025.

Resources:

• Module 3: Crafting Your Communications Plan
• CAO Pre and Post Launch Endorsement Letters
• COACHE Survey Invitation and Reminder Email Templates
• Sample Communications Plan: Louisiana State University [PDF]
• Sample Email Outreach: CUNY Brooklyn College [PDF]

COACHE has completed its IRB review through Harvard University’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects. For most COACHE partner institutions, a copy of the Harvard approval letter is adequate documentation of this project’s bona fides. However, some institutions demand more to approve this survey research on their campuses. Please get in touch with your local IRB office and let our team know if you need assistance obtaining approval.

Any campus with a pending IRB application cannot begin survey administration with the full cohort and delayed starts typically result in lower response rates.

Please confirm your IRB status in the Survey Administration Portal by Monday, October 13, 2025. 

Custom questions are due on October 28, 2025.

COACHE takes steps to ensure that solicitation emails are not blocked by spam filters, but filtering software still has the potential to block our attempts to reach your faculty.

Contact your IT staff to have the following email addresses “whitelisted” on spam filters running on your institution’s email servers:
 

• coachefaculty@abtsurvey.com
• coachefaculty@abtglobal.com

Please update your email "whitelisting" status in the Survey Administration Portal by Tuesday, November 4, 2025. 

Pass-through variables help institutions link COACHE data to other data sources. The data are appended to the original population file. Then, when a respondent completes the survey, the data in the pass-through variable are appended to the data set. Institutions have used this approach to link COACHE data to a host of other data sources, such as:

• Results from other institutional surveys 
• Human Resources codes for ranks or appointment statuses unique to your institution 
• Faculty activity or productivity data (e.g., course loads, number of publications, presentations, teaching load, etc.) 
• Contract length (e.g., nine-month, ten-month, twelve-month)

To decide if pass-through variables can be a valuable tool for your team, consider the following questions: 

• How will the pass-through variables change your approach to analyzing your results? 
• Does the addition of pass-through variables change your local IRB status? Check with your local IRB Office before proceeding.

Up to five pass-through variables can be included for $100 per variable. To include pass-through variables, please submit your decision in the Survey Administration Portal by Tuesday, November 4, 2025. 

The Population File is the most important deliverable of the Survey Administration process. This document allows COACHE to reach eligible faculty and gives us information critical to analyzing the results and understanding patterns of non-response. Be sure to review the resources below to prepare your file correctly. 

Please be aware that, once submitted, the COACHE team will review the population file and be in communication for file reconciliation.

Population files must be uploaded to the "Documents" tab of the Survey Administration Portal by Friday, November 14, 2025. 

Resources: 

• Module 4: Preparing Your Population File
• Population File Template [Excel download]

COACHE will send a test solicitation email one to two weeks before survey administration to you and/or your IT staff. To participate in the spam filter test, please provide COACHE with the email address(es) of the person(s) who will receive the test message in the Survey Administration Portal by January 6, 2026.

Consider including individuals across multiple divisions. Some divisions have different spam filtering systems (e.g., Schools of Medicine or Colleges of Computer Science) due to the types of data they handle. To ensure that the "whitelisting" covers all divisions, make sure that your list is representative.

Please be aware that this is a collaborative process, and the COACHE team will be in communication to ensure successful email whitelisting and spam testing.

Survey launches in February 2026.  Survey window is February - April 2025.