7.4. Designing Effective Evaluations

One component mentioned in the videos in the earlier chapter was how you design your evaluation. Sometimes, you can have a face-to-face conversation or focus group with stakeholders to ask them questions and get verbal responses. A focus group is a style of evaluation that is generally a small, carefully selected group of folks invited to discuss a particular topic in a conversation guided by a facilitator.  A very basic example of this occurs many evenings after a family dinner. Mom (facilitator) asks, “So, how was dinner?” and that elicits feedback from all who ate (participants) . . . “It was delicious!”, “I thought it was too salty.” “I wish we didn’t ever have to eat broccoli again!” is verbal feedback in that particular focus group. Sometimes, focus groups watch a video and offer verbal feedback. Other times, they might provide feedback on a rating sheet or survey.

A focus group is a very efficient way to gather feedback since you really only have to host one meeting for each group of stakeholders. But what if one person dominates the conversation? Or another person refuses to talk? What if folks are worried that their answers might get back to someone who is in charge of their job? What if the event is too large and you are unable to gather all of the participants in one space to have a focused conversation?

Those concerns could lead you to determine that a more anonymous/private survey is the way to go. If you choose to create a survey or evaluation form, it’s critical that you are careful when choosing what you want to evaluate and designing the questions, statements, and rating criteria to gather the information that you want.

A feedback survey is a structured questionnaire used to collect opinions about an event or experience from folks who participated in that event/experience. The survey might be completed using paper and pencil, online, or via phone. Surveys can be very simple ratings or involve a longer answer style.

Tailoring Your Evaluation

You’ve decided that you want to gather feedback from everyone involved in your event, so now you need to make some decisions. How do you want to gather that feedback? And what do you want to ask?

Deciding what to ask is determined by what you actually want to know. What were you most unsure about when planning the event?

• Venue
• Music/Entertainment
• Speakers
• Vendors
• Food
• Decorations
• Cost

To keep folks engaged in the feedback process, it is a good idea to make sure your questions are focused on the areas you’re seeking to improve, not the areas that you don’t want outside opinions on. We’ll get into the types of questions to ask in a moment, but let’s focus on the what part of evaluating now. Let’s say you were limited in your choice of venue due to the location or time of year. You can’t really change that, so rather than asking questions about the venue, focus the questions on things that can change, such as food and speakers. You can always include a more open-ended question at the end, and you may get comments about the venue there.

Once you’ve decided what you want to evaluate, now you get to decide how to ask the questions. Anyone who has hosted an event and asked for feedback afterward will likely tell you that the best results that they get are by targeting their questions to the audience. Yes, it would be faster to have one survey that is given to every person who attended the event (speaker, host, vendor, volunteer, attendee, etc.). However, if folks feel that the questions don’t apply to their experience, they are less likely to offer valuable feedback. See below for some samples.