Get to know your target group

Documenting, measuring and analysing the effects of a meeting or event is simple, but needs time spent on it from you as organiser.

Good documentation of your meeting or event will make it easier for others to quickly get involved in the work, for reporting the project development and final reporting to, for example, sponsors and other interested parties.

Documentation gives you a good structure of your work, which in turn leads to you and your colleagues more easily differentiating between what needs to be done and prioritised in order to achieve the project’s goals.

Tips for good documentation

• Save all files in the same place (cloud, hard drive, etc.) and ensure that you make regular back-ups of your material
• Make a clear folder structure that follows the meeting’s/event’s various sections
• Plan for and create picture documentation of all establishment, implementation and disestablishment

As organiser, you can choose a number of different methods, but the most common and simplest is to compile the participants’ email addresses for a digital survey to be sent out immediately after a meeting or event. You can also choose to ring or conduct surveys on-site, etc.

A general rule is that you should have a minimum of 30% response frequency to your survey in order to make an adequate and sustainable analysis of the material.

There are many good digital tools on the market. Two examples are SurveyMonkey and Google Forms.

Once the survey is done, the real work begins – the evaluation itself. Weigh up different interpretations of the result and don’t draw conclusions too quickly.

Is this a recurring arrangement? Ensure that you use the same survey in order to get comparable results over time and add the new questions that you also want answered.