Posts filed under ‘Conference / event evaluation’
Evaluating conferences and events: new approaches and initiatives
Today at the European Evaluation Society Conference in Helsinki, Finland, I am chairing a session on conference evaluation, and I’m happy to share my introductory slides with readers, found below.
outcome-focused event evaluation
Here is an interesting post on conference/event evaluation from the IDS impact and learning blog.
Interesting in that they propose to go beyond evaluating just participants’ reactions and learnings from events to consider also the impact on organisers and the contributors (speakers, etc.).
Read the full post here>>
Conference evaluation: mapping success stories
New thinking on conference evaluation
Here is an interesting fact sheet from the Evaluation Uncertainty blog:
How to evaluate a conference (pdf)
The author looks at the perspective of the attendees, exhibitors and sponsors.
For example, for attendees, the focus is placed on knowledge transfer, networking and expectations.
Conference evaluation – at a glance
For those interested in evaluating conferences, events and seminars, the following presentation may be of interest to you.
With Laetitia Lienart of the International Aids Society, I presented an overview of conference evaluation for the Geneva Evaluation Network last Wednesday.
New Google group on conference evaluation
If you are interested in the evaluation of events and conference then I’ d suggest you join the new Google group on this subject:
http://groups.google.com/group/conference_evaluation?hl=en
Join the conversation!
What makes for the perfect internal conference?
As regular readers will know I am interested in evaluating conferences and events. So this report caught my eye: What makes for the perfect internal conference.
The report details a discussion from some 40 private and public sector communication professionals in the UK and recommendations for the *perfect internal conference*.
I particularly like what they had to say on “Outcomes and effectiveness”:
“If the conference is part of a wider initiative, this must beclear to participants. Stakeholders need to define and agree on the desired outcomes in advance. This doesn’t preclude unexpected benefits, but creates a frame on which to measure success”
Measuring long term impact of conferences
Often we evaluate conferences with their participants just after the conferences, measuring mostly reactions and learnings, as I’ve written about previously.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting actually to try and measure the longer term impact of a conference? This is what the International AIDS Society has done concerning one of its international conferences – measuring longer term impact 14 months after the conference – you can view the report (pdf) here.
Their overall assessment of impact was as follows:
“AIDS 2008 had a clear impact on delegates’ work and on their organizations, and that the conference influence has extended far beyond those who attended, thanks to networking, collaboration, knowledge sharing and advocacy at all levels.”
Presenting evaluation results in multimedia video
As I’ve written about before, the way in which we present evaluation findings – usually in a long undigestable report – certainly has its limitations. It’s been sometime I’ve been thinking that with the developments in multimedia there must be better ways than the written document to communicate evalution findings – and here it is! We’ve just completed a multimedia video report on the evaluation of the LIFT France conference:
This is certainly the way forward. Thanks to Patricia (concept & inteviews) , Thierry (filming & production), Benchpoint (survey) and Yona (graphics).
evaluating events and conferences
I’ve written previously about evaluating events and conferences, and in a recent evaluation I undertook for the LIFT09 conference, apart from measurements of attitudes and reactions to the conference, we also looked at what online visibility the conference generated. We found three interesting results based on qualitative and quantiative analysis of blogs and tweets:
- 22% of the blog posts analysed had embedded videos of conference presentations (or liked to them). This is an indication of the importance of the videos in promoting the conference and its themes.
- 32% of the people blogging on the conference were not actually attending the conference – indicating the “reach” of the conference outside of the direct participants.
- The number of tweets on the conference peaked sharply during the three days of the conference (on the second day notably) while blog posts, in smaller numbers, continued to be written about the conference weeks later. The graph below illustrates this point:
Graph data was generated by http://www.technorati.com and http://www.hashtags.org.
The full conference evaluation report can be viewed here (pdf)>>
