Sharing your Success: Evaluate Your Preservation Week Event
Regardless of the size of your Preservation Week event, you can choose a simple, quick way to collect information to a few questions. Asking a few questions can make the difference between interesting the media, showing your success in a concrete way, and answering questions about the value of a program or other activity. The questions can provide you with concrete things to share about your organization’s programs or other activities. Of course you’ll know some kinds of information you want, but you may find other valuable information just by reading your users’ comments on a quick “Tell Us What You Thought of Our Program” form. Believe it or not, this is evaluation doesn’t have to be extensive or time-consuming.
Below are some standard items of information you may find useful for telling people about your program after it’s held. It’s all available from records most organizations usually make (e.g. sign in, registration, gate count, seats filled or unfilled, etc.; where any funding came from; partners…) combined with a few questions to your users or visitors. Here’s one example.
| Session Title: ABC Event Ticket to Leave: Please fill out this form before you leave this event. |
|
List three tips from this session that you might use:
What did you like best about this program? _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ |
The most-time consuming part might be creating a paper table with columns for tick marks for things you want to count, or a computer spreadsheet to record the same information and add it up for you. It’s worth the time to help you tell a compelling program story.
See the listing of things you might want to report, and easy sources of the information.
When you've completed your report, send a copy to the Preservation Week Working Group via our online form. We will add it to the "Share Your Story" section of this site.
Note that events, programs, and other kinds of activities differ, and different questions might be useful to answer and report. Program is the term used below, but it can stand for any special service, or any routine service adapted for Preservation Week or another theme.