There’s room for debate on what a “good” response rate is for a survey. But what if your audience isn’t seeing it to begin with? The university learned long ago how to avoid important messages being flagged as junk or spam. But this semester marks the first time in three years when Assessment has conducted university-level surveys using email. And although the precaution of avoiding spam filters was in place, we have been getting a number of people pointing out that it still isn’t landing in their inboxes. (By the way, thank you to everyone who took the time to let us know!)

The culprit turned out to be a feature introduced in 2016 that was part of the system when the university switched to Office 365 that same year: Clutter. Adjustable by the user, Clutter determines which incoming messages don’t appear to be top-priority items and keeps them out of the Inbox. So while we can ensure that uncommon but important events like a campus-wide survey aren’t mistaken for junk, we can’t change individual Clutter settings. On the plus side, if you catch an important item in Clutter and move it to your Inbox, the system should take the hint when future messages arrive.

If you’d like to learn more and see how to adjust your settings, check out this link. And if you have the chance to add your voice when we’re trying to learn and improve the campus experience, take it– we really do read every response. Even the sarcastic ones.