Nerida and I have been running a number of workshops over the past year, and we eagerly read the evaluation forms we collect at the end of each of these events. In the lead up to two more workshops, I revisited the evaluation forms from the recent Melbourne and Sunshine Coast Council events. These quotes are from the qualitative parts of our evaluation forms:
“Thank you, communicating verbally in groups is not my strong point, but these techniques seem easy and less threatening – very valuable” (Melbourne)
“A great workshop with real application. I look forward to using some of these tools as we engage the Sunshine Coast community in implementing our Waterway Strategy” (Sunshine Coast)
Generally we leave it at that, just read through the comments and get a general impression of what attendees felt. Today, however, I put the results into a column format and I found it easier to get a picture of what people felt about our work. This diagrammatic representation of responses gave me a very good understanding about our strenghts, areas for improvement and how to continuously adapt to meet the needs of our clients.
Overall, this exercise confirmed my view that the evaluations with greatest insights are those that use both qualitative and quantitative assessment approaches.
Our Melbourne (graph 1) and Sunshine Coast Council (graph 2) results are shown below, with the categories from left to right recording how attendees felt about a range of workshop factors – meet expectations / presenters subject knowledge / maintain attendees interest / teaching methods used / relevance to attendees work / stimulating content / well organised / supporting workshop materials. The rankings are Excellent, Good , Satisfactory – just the one satisfactory out of 30 people, and I am pleased to say that there are no Poor rankings which is brilliant! Siwan
