HEDS Sense of Community Survey
The HEDS Sense of Community Survey asks everyone at your institution—undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators—about the extent to which they feel a sense of community at your institution and what experiences promote or diminish their sense of community. The survey asks people:
- If they feel welcome and supported at your institution
- If they are comfortable sharing their perspectives and opinions with other people in the community
- How connected they feel to other people at your institution
- How satisfied they are with their sense of community at your institution
- How their interactions with students, coworkers, colleagues, and supervisors impact their sense of community
- The degree to which they believe that people at your institution are working together to fulfill your institution’s mission
- How your institution can better support people and increase their sense of community
This three-step framework, developed from our first year of data, shows how specific campus experiences shape people’s sense of community and the positive outcomes that can be attained when people have a strong sense of community.
Also, our analysis of the survey data shows that a person’s role (e.g., student, faculty, staff, administrator) is the most important factor shaping how they experience community at your institution. So, to truly understand the overall sense of community on your campus, it is important to survey your entire campus.
The survey is anonymous to encourage people to openly share information about their experiences and perspectives. This means that we will not include personal information, such as name, email address, student or employee identification number, or IP address, in the data we send to your institution.
Survey Background
We developed this survey using findings from focus groups on community with students, faculty, and staff that we’ve held at a range of institutions across the country over the past few years. We grounded the survey questions in the four dimensions of McMillan & Chavis’s (1986) definition and theory of community:
- Membership
- Influence
- Integration and fulfillment of needs
- Emotional connection
View a copy of the survey instrument with development notes.
NEW Discrimination and Harassment Module
This short optional module is designed to help you learn if people in your community are experiencing discrimination, harassment, and negative remarks. These questions come from our HEDS Campus Climate Survey. If your institution has administered this survey in the past, the module allows you to continue to track this information. There is a small fee, and if you use this module, you will be limited to five supplemental questions.
Click on the following questions to learn more.
You can administer the HEDS Sense of Community Survey for any 3–6 week period between October 6, 2025, and May 29, 2026.
Please be aware that you must register at least seven weeks (35 business days) prior to the date on which you plan to begin administering the survey. The last day to register for a 2024-2025 administration is March 20, 2025.
Live updates:
- We provide ongoing updates while your survey is open to give you a first look at select, high-level data from the survey. These updates will give you an early, overall sense of how people responded to parts of the survey, and they allow you to gauge your response rates so you can adjust your communication strategies if necessary.
Unit-record survey data:
- You will receive a preliminary version of your institution’s unit-record survey data in both SPSS and Microsoft Excel files within ten days of your survey closing. You will receive final data files that will include any HEDS calculated variables and/or indicators with your final survey report.
Comparative reports:
- An internal report comparing the responses of your students, faculty, staff, and administrators.
- We will send this within 50 business days of date your survey closes. Please note, we will only create an internal comparison report if you survey all populations on your campus.
- A report that compares the responses of your students and employees to the students and employees of all other participating institutions on all survey questions and indicators.
- We cannot begin working on the comparison reports until the survey closes for all institutions at the end of May 2026. Please note, that we have several surveys that close at this time and will be working on multiple reports. We anticipate delivering these reports by mid-summer 2026.
YES! Here’s how:
- We insert your institution’s name at the top of each page of the survey and in the text of applicable questions
- You can customize the survey invitations and reminders
- You can add custom, institution-specific questions at the end of the survey
While you can add supplemental questions to the end, we do not modify our survey questions or response options. In order for us to offer the benefit of comparative data between participating institutions in our survey reports, the questions and response options have to be the same across all the colleges and universities using the survey.
- Survey base cost – $2,500
- Survey base cost for HEDS members – $650
These prices include up to 10 supplemental questions. There are some custom options for additional fees. We will post more information on survey options, policies, and fees soon.
Discrimination and Harassment Module
- Module fee – $350
- Module fee for HEDS members – $300
If using this module, you will be limited to 5 supplemental questions. You can view the questions in this module in the Downloads section of this webpage.
To learn more about your institution becoming a HEDS member, please visit our Join HEDS page.
If you have any questions, please email us at communitysurvey@hedsconsortium.org.
Downloads