August: Evaluation - Monitoring Your Event

The event is drawing nearer and it’s time to ensure that everything is in place ready for a great weekend. Now you need to think about how you will evaluate your event, the activities and experiences that you will have offered.

Why Do You Need to Evaluate Your Event?

Monitoring and evaluating your event will help you assess how well you are doing in order to do it better next time round. It is about asking what happened and why - what worked and what could have been better. It is about using your own and your visitor’s experiences to learn more about your event and using what has been learnt.

You may simply wish to gauge success on the number of visitors you attract. This is basic quantitative evaluation. There are many different ways that you can encourage visitors to participate in this type of evaluation without it becoming onerous.

• A simple ‘number clicker’ can be bought in many news agents or office supply stores. A volunteer at the door can use this to record visitor figures.
• You can also tally your visitor numbers by having clear containers available for people to drop in coloured pebbles.
Although you may wish simply to count numbers you may decide to tally how many men, women and children attended.
• This can be done easily by using the above method and allocating different colours for males, females and visitors under 16.
• You could give out raffle tickets as kind of entrance tickets. To distinguish young and adult visitors you could use different colours.
There is also a variety of methods by which you can make a narrative evaluation of your event. Some of these are suggestions from organisers.
• The HODs team provide you with a template for a visitors book.
• Some organisers create their own questionnaires.
• You can provide a postcard or ‘post it’ note wall, where visitors can leave comments.
• Luggage tags tied onto a branch in response to questions such as: What have you enjoyed most about your visit?
You can make a qualitative evaluation of your event. Some of these are methods used by organisers.
• You can provide a circular target where visitors place sticky spots to grade the event, the ‘bull’s eye’ indicating an excellent event.
• Use the visitor feedback forms provided by the Civic Trust if you have space on your site and please return these. You may make your own analysis of these.
• Some of the larger event organisers provide evaluation sheets grading their visitors experience. It is usually suggested that an even number of answer options are available, otherwise people tend to opt for the middle response.
• Local authorities can use evaluation of the event to provide them with evidence of ‘best value’ investment as in Stockport.

1. Feedback forms (available from July)
2. Visitors book