People & HR

How to run an employee engagement survey as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

People & HRFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You run a cohort-based course or coaching practice and you have no real idea how your students actually feel until someone cancels or leaves a bad review. You might send a mid-cohort check-in via a Google Form, get 40% response rate, paste the results into a Google Sheet, stare at it for twenty minutes, and then do nothing systematic with the data because you're already prepping next week's live call. There's no connection between survey responses and who gets a personal follow-up email, who's at risk of churning before renewal, or whether lesson 7 is consistently where people fall off. You rebuild the same form every cohort and lose the historical comparisons.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated student engagement survey that goes out at the right cohort milestone — week 2, mid-program, and post-completion — without you manually triggering it each time

A triage layer that flags low-engagement or low-satisfaction responses and drafts a personal follow-up email for each flagged student so you can respond in one click rather than writing from scratch

A running summary of sentiment trends across cohorts that you can actually use to improve curriculum, not just read once and forget

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Connect Gmail via Starch's scheduled sync so inbound survey notification emails and outbound follow-ups route through the Email Triage app. Connect Notion via Starch's scheduled sync to store and update the aggregated cohort sentiment pages. Connect your survey tool (Typeform or Google Forms) from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries responses live when a new submission triggers the workflow. If your course platform (Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific) doesn't have a direct API connector, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed — to pull enrollment and completion status alongside the survey data.

Prompts to copy

Every time a student submits a survey response with an NPS below 7 or a satisfaction rating below 3 out of 5, draft a personal reply from me acknowledging their specific feedback and offering a 15-minute call. Pull their name and cohort from the form submission and add it to my inbox as a high-priority draft.

Build me a knowledge base page that aggregates all student survey responses by cohort. For each cohort, show average NPS, most common themes in the open-text answers, and which lesson or week had the most negative comments. Update it each time new responses come in.

Create a task for me every Monday morning listing any survey responses from the past week that haven't received a reply yet, sorted by satisfaction score low to high.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail to Starch (scheduled sync) so the Email Triage app can see incoming survey notification emails and queue outbound follow-ups for your review.

2 Connect your survey tool — Typeform or Google Forms — from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries new responses live each time a submission comes in, so you don't manually export anything.

3 Tell Starch: 'Send my week-2 check-in survey link to every student who enrolled in the current cohort more than 12 days ago and hasn't received the week-2 survey yet.' Starch cross-references your enrollment list and queues the sends.

4 Set up the low-score triage automation: any response with an NPS below 7 or a satisfaction score below 3 out of 5 triggers the Email Triage app to draft a personal follow-up addressed to that student, referencing their specific feedback.

5 Review drafted replies in the Email Triage inbox — each one is pre-written and ready to send with one click, or you can edit before sending. You never start a response from a blank page.

6 Connect Notion via Starch's scheduled sync. Tell Starch: 'Keep a Notion page called Cohort Sentiment Tracker updated with average NPS, top recurring themes from open-text answers, and which week or module generated the most negative comments — broken down by cohort.'

7 Use the Task Manager app to create a recurring Monday task: 'List any survey responses from the last 7 days with no reply sent yet, ordered by satisfaction score ascending.' This keeps at-risk students from falling through the cracks during a busy launch week.

8 After each cohort closes, tell Starch: 'Summarize the post-completion survey results for [Cohort Name] — overall NPS, completion rate correlation with satisfaction, and the three most common pieces of curriculum feedback. Write it as a one-page debrief I can save to Notion and reference when I redesign the program.'

9 If your course platform is Kajabi or Teachable and doesn't surface completion data via a direct integration, Starch automates your course platform dashboard through your browser to pull per-student module completion percentages alongside the survey data — no API needed.

10 At the start of each new cohort, tell Starch: 'Pull the last three cohort debrief pages from Notion and highlight any curriculum feedback that appeared in at least two cohorts. Put it in my inbox as a pre-launch reminder.' This turns historical survey data into an actual feedback loop instead of a graveyard of Google Forms.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Spring 2026 Cohort Mid-Program Check-In — 38 Responses

Sample numbers from a real run

Total enrolled students	52
Survey responses received	38
Response rate	73
Average NPS	61
Responses flagged for follow-up (NPS < 7)	9
Follow-up emails drafted by Starch and sent by you	9
Students who booked a follow-up call after receiving reply	4
Students who cited 'Week 4 pacing' as an issue	11

The Spring 2026 cohort hit week 4 of an 8-week program. Starch queued the mid-program survey link to all 52 enrolled students; 38 responded over 72 hours. The Email Triage app flagged 9 responses with NPS below 7 and drafted a personalized reply for each — referencing the student's name, the specific week they were in, and their open-text comment. You reviewed all 9 drafts in about 20 minutes and sent them. Four students booked 15-minute calls; none of them churned before the end of the cohort. The Notion Cohort Sentiment Tracker updated automatically to show that 11 of 38 respondents — 29% — mentioned Week 4 pacing as a friction point. That's the same theme that appeared in the Winter 2025 debrief. When you start rebuilding the curriculum for the Fall cohort, Starch will surface that pattern as part of your pre-launch reminder rather than you having to dig through old forms to find it.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Survey response rate per cohort (target: >65% mid-program, >50% post-completion)

NPS by cohort over time — are satisfaction scores trending up or down as you iterate the curriculum?

Percentage of flagged low-score respondents who received a personal follow-up within 48 hours

Churn rate among students who flagged issues vs. those who received a follow-up call

Recurring curriculum feedback themes — how many consecutive cohorts has a given lesson been cited as a pain point?

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Forms + Google Sheets

Free and familiar, but you manually export responses, paste them into a Sheet, and build pivot tables yourself — there's no automatic triage, no drafted follow-ups, and no connection to your email or curriculum docs.

Typeform standalone

Better-looking surveys and partial analytics built in, but results still live in Typeform's dashboard, disconnected from your Gmail, your Notion curriculum pages, or any automated follow-up workflow.

Kajabi / Teachable built-in surveys

Native to your course platform and requires no extra tool, but the data stays inside the platform with no way to triage low scores into email drafts or roll up trends across multiple cohorts over time.

Delighted or Survicate

Purpose-built NPS tools with clean dashboards and automatic scoring, but they cost $100–$300/month at solo-operator scale, and the results still don't connect to your inbox, tasks, or Notion debrief workflow without manual exports or Zapier chains.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — founder inbox, knowledge management, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My survey tool is Typeform. Does Starch actually connect to it?

Yes — connect Typeform from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries new responses live when a submission comes in. If you use Google Forms, same approach. You don't need to export anything manually.

I use Kajabi for my course platform but Kajabi isn't in your list of direct integrations. Can Starch still pull student data from it?

Yes. For course platforms that don't have a direct connection in Starch's catalog, Starch automates your Kajabi dashboard through your browser — no API needed. It can pull enrollment status and module completion data to cross-reference against survey responses, the same way a human would by logging in and clicking through the reports.

Will Starch actually store my historical survey data so I can compare across cohorts?

Starch isn't a long-horizon data warehouse — it's not designed to archive years of raw survey exports. The pattern that works well here is using Notion (synced to Starch on a schedule) as the persistent layer. Starch writes cohort summaries and sentiment trends there, and those pages accumulate over time. The raw response data lives in Typeform or Google Forms; Starch surfaces the patterns.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My students' feedback responses feel sensitive.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of today. For most solo coaches and small cohort programs this isn't a blocking issue, but it's worth knowing if you're running corporate training programs with enterprise clients who have specific compliance requirements.

I don't want Starch to automatically send follow-up emails — I want to review them first. Is that how it works?

That's exactly how it works. Starch drafts the follow-up and puts it in your Email Triage inbox as a pending draft. You review it, edit if you want, and send it. Nothing goes out without your approval. You can change this if you want fully automated sends, but the default is human-in-the-loop.

I rebuild the same survey every cohort. Can Starch help me reuse the same setup?

Yes. Once you describe the survey workflow to Starch — which questions to send, when to send them relative to enrollment date, how to score and triage responses — that setup persists. At the start of a new cohort you tell Starch the cohort name and enrollment list, and it runs the same workflow. You're not rebuilding anything from scratch.