Evaluation

Building an evaluation process into your engagements gives participants an additional opportunity to make their voices heard. It's also a great way to learn how well your events are meeting your audience's needs—including how accessible and inclusive they are, and how successful the accessibility measures you offer are working for them.

The primary way we evaluate our events is by sending out a survey to all attendees via email shortly after the event.

We recommend budgeting time and resources in your event planning process for:

• drafting evaluation questions, including consulting with partners about any questions they would like to include
• building your evaluation form in your chosen platform—we often use SurveyMonkey, but you might use another online platform, or a printed paper form
• reviewing the results with your team afterwards and implementing feedback

It's important to decide in advance how you want to evaluate the impact of your programming. Ask yourself, your team and your partners: What does a successful event look like and mean for us? How can we determine whether we have achieved this?

There are ways to measure impact beyond just quantitative data (e.g., attendee numbers, or a rating scale measuring satisfaction with the event). Qualitative data, including written testimonials, comments and suggestions, can be very powerful. We like to include open-ended questions on our evaluation surveys, as well as space for comments to expand on quantitative questions.

It's a good idea to plan how you'll use the data you gather from your evaluation process. Are you committed to reading participants' feedback and potentially incorporating it into your planning for future events? Will you be reporting the evaluation results back out to your audiences?

We make time to review our survey results as a team and decide how to act on them. This might include capturing select data or quotes for future reports, or determining if and how we can incorporate people’s feedback into future events.

Thinking about these things helps you to be intentional and respectful of both your participants’ time and your own time—there's no need to ask for information that you are not going to use later.