Student & Parent Directories

Question

Hello community!Hoping to get some input on how schools are running their Directory. We want to have a Directory at each of the Student, Parent and Staff levels. We are setting up our student Directory, pulling all data and contact info from our SIS. Is it possible to send a survey to parents using the Student Directory if the parent email is in the embedded data? Or is that best practice… should we be sending surveys with parents as the intended respondents to parents in the Parent Directory and not using the Student Directory? If so, how does responses data get connected at the student level? For example, if we want to send out a survey to parents of students with an IEP, or in Grade level 5, 7, or 9, is it possible to do that through the Student Directory where that identifying information is collected?

Robert Carlisle · Accepted Answer

I debated how to handle this for quite a while, and I’m not sure my approach is perfect, but here’s what I learned along the way.

Yes — you’ll definitely want separate directories for students and parents. I decided not to mix data between them (so no student info in the parent directory, and no parent info in the student one).

In our setup, I added the parent’s database ID from our SIS to the Parent Directory. That way, any survey responses from parents could later be linked back to the corresponding student record or records outside of Qualtrics. This gave us the flexibility to connect data accurately without cluttering the directories.

When I needed to target a specific subset of parents — for example, those with students in certain grade levels or program types — I’d pull that list from the SIS and create a custom mailing list in the Parent Directory. This approach let me use the SIS for filtering (which is often more powerful) and still take advantage of Qualtrics’ distribution and tracking features.

It’s worked well so far and feels like a good balance.

Interesting approach! I was looking at this through the lens of having Qualtrics “do it all” for me, but I see how that process could be simpler. I run into the issue of not having a great mechanism for “pulling a list” from our SIS but it might be an easy fix for IT. How do you create the mailing list through the Directory after you’ve pulled the list from SIS? using the Parent ID and lookup?

Great questions! When I first started, I manually pulled parent lists from our SIS and uploaded them into Qualtrics. Later, we automated the export so our SIS sends a file to Google Drive daily. A Qualtrics workflow now pulls that file and updates the Parent Directory automatically. I was able to set that up myself, but your IT team could absolutely help if needed.

For creating custom mailing lists, here’s what has worked best for me:

Filter the parent list in the SIS
I either run a custom query (like parents of students with IEPs or in specific grade levels) or pull a larger dataset and filter in Excel.
Export only the Parent ID
Save a CSV with just one column:
- Column header: External data reference
- Values: Parent IDs from the SIS
  (This assumes the Parent Directory is already set up with SIS Parent ID defined as the External data reference, and duplicates are resolved by merging on the External data reference.)
Create the mailing list in Qualtrics
- Go to Directory
- Click Segments & Lists
- Choose Create a list and name it
- Then Upload a file (or “Add contacts to list” if adding to an existing list)
- Upload the CSV with Parent IDs

Qualtrics will match those IDs to the contacts that already exist in the Parent Directory. It doesn’t duplicate contacts or alter directory records. It simply creates a new list that includes all of your filtered parents, along with all their existing metadata. You can then distribute the survey directly to that list.

I’ve found this method keeps the directories clean and leverages tools outside Qualtrics for more powerful filtering. Hope this helps, and happy to answer anything else as you get it set up!

KathyM · Answer

When I set up a directory I create a student, a staff, and a parent. However, in the student directory I include the parent information. Since surveys may need to go to both parents/guardians we used Parent 1 First Name, Parent 1 Last Name, Parent 1 email, Parent 1 Phone, then Parent 2.
In the parent directory, we also linked the student. Student 1 Local ID, Student 1 State ID, then Student 2, Student 3, Student 4, Student 5, Student 6 (I don’t think we had a need to go over 6).
This allowed us to send surveys to parents and use embedded data to branch so that a parent didn’t have to complete 3 surveys if they had an elementary, middle, and high school student. They could receive one link, and we allowed them to come back and finish later.
It might have been overkill to have the data overlap in both directories, but depending on the department sending the survey it was helpful.
In your example, I would use the Student Directory because it would make sense to send on survey per child, rather than one survey for multiple children.
Hope this helps!

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