Evaluating events and conferences

Like me, you might be suprised to know that businesses spend an estimate 150 billion US dollars per year in organising meetings and events in the US alone.

But in my experience, organisations rarely measure the impact of meetings and events: what did attendance at meetings or events change in the performance of individuals and organisations as a whole?

I’ve done some event evaluation projects in the past years and have developed an “event scorecard”. To summarise and share my experiences, I have just created a fact sheet “Evaluating events and conferences (pdf)” – good luck with it!

Glenn

(above photo from Lift conference 2007, Geneva, Switzerland – photo by noneck).

Writing better survey questions

I’ve written previously about resources for putting together surveys and I’m often asked about the “wrongs and rights” of writing questions for surveys.

So I’ve put together a factsheet (pdf) that has 12 hints on writing better survey questions using real examples – both good and bad.

View factsheet on writing better survey questions (pdf) >>

Glenn

Challenges in measuring social media

Tom Watson of the Dummyspit blog has brought to my attention a new report (pdf) from the Society of New Communication Research that examines the elusive question about how to measure the influence and effectiveness of social media, such as blogs, podcasts, etc.

As the report states although social media is clearly changing “the way we think about media and influence … [companies] are still struggling to find effective metrics for deciding who are the influential players” (p.16).

The report summarises current measurement and evaluation practice as:

• Top criteria for determining the relevance or influence of a blogger or podcaster are quality of content, relevance of content to the company or brand, and search engine rank.

• For evaluating a person’s influence in online communities and social networks, the main measures are participation level, frequency of activity and prominence in the market or community.

• About half the surveyed communicators formally measure their social media activities. Their goals are “to enhance relationships, improve the reputation of their businesses, drive customer awareness of their online activities and solicit customer comments and feedback.” (p.16)

There are certainly some valid points there – read Tom’s full post here,  just be aware of some of the more dodgy social media metrics that are out there…

Glenn

New portal on communications evaluation

A new portal has been launched on evaluation communications – with plenty of interesting resources. The Communication Controlling portal is supported and updated by experts from Leipzig University and the “Value Creation through Communication” working group of the German Public Relations Association (Deutsche Public Relations Gesellschaft, DPRG). Visit the portal>>