One of the most common questions we receive during the parent survey process:
“Is this actually confidential? What does the club see?”
At the time of this writing (July 16, 2025) we’ve had approximately 70,000 parent survey responses in the past year from more than 90 clubs across the United States and Canada. Youth soccer surveys is what our 501(c)(3) nonprofit does. The reason we do it is to help clubs create better player experiences.
As such, we do everything we can to ensure your survey response does not adversely impact your child. A Failure to do so would be failing at our mission. At the same time, we need to provide useful data to your club so they can can learn from it and improve.
You care about confidentiality. We do too.
Here are five important things about our survey confidentiality:
- The clubs we work with genuinely want you to speak your truth. This is one of the reasons why they hire our nonprofit. We have a legal contract with each club that guarantees Satori will never share who responded, or who said what, for any parent survey. I can honestly say that each club we work with truly wants you to have that confidentiality. For example, not once has a club leader asked me to reveal a single identity. Ultimately, they want an accurate picture of what it feels like to be in each team; true confidentiality is a requirement for that to happen.
- Comments are worth thinking twice about. Comments are optional and we share them word-for-word with the club, summarized by team. If you’re concerned about comment anonymity, you may want to carefully edit or choose not to include it.
- Even though comments are useful, they are absolutely NOT necessary for your response to be valuable. In fact, the most valuable part of the response is the quantitative part. These rating-scale questions, before the optional comment boxes, are chosen because each of them is highly correlated with retention (good topic for a future blog), tie to research on motivational theory, and pass the common sense test of things that sound like they should matter! We average all the quantitative answers from a team, and share the results at a summarized level.
- It’s worth noting that your responses are NOT shared as a string, so there is no way to connect one question’s response to another. We average and share each question separately.
- Our database at Satori is able to see who responded and who said what. This is important because it allows us to do multiple things that ultimately improve you and your player’s experience. A couple examples are that we:
- Only send reminders to people that haven’t yet completed the survey. Nobody likes being bothered about something that is already complete. That said, unfortunately any reminders your club sends won’t filter out those who have already responded because, again, that information is confidential!
- Conduct research to better understand what creates great experiences. Our database has survey responses, and other important information about each player such as whether they choose to return the following season. As such, we’ve been able to perform research at a level of quality and magnitude that has never before been done in youth soccer. Making sure we use this information for the betterment of youth soccer, and not personal gain, is one of the reasons Satori is a nonprofit.
While a (somewhat) short blog post can never explain every detail on something as important as survey confidentiality, we take pride in how methodically, consistently, and kindly we conduct ourselves in this regard. Clubs want to know how things are really going within their organization. Honest, confidential feedback from people like you is essential.
