Measuring Success: Tips for Evaluating Your Events
08/17/2016
The Importance of Evaluating Your Meeting
Think about your community's top underage drinking prevention priority. Evaluating your efforts to address this priority can help you determine what is working well and where adjustments need to be made. More importantly, evaluation helps you quantify your success, which you can then share with attendees and the community at-large so they stay informed and supportive of your work.
Collecting information and measuring results also may be required by your funding source, advisory board, or members. In addition to fulfilling these requirements, a well-conducted evaluation:
- Helps assess the progress of a prevention activity;
- Identifies what does and does not work in a particular setting;
- Builds community support;
- Strengthens accountability;
- Supports sustainability; and
- Influences decision makers.
SAMHSA provides numerous evaluation and measurement tools through its Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies (CAPT). Additionally, there are a number of low-cost online tools that provide easy interfaces for building surveys and viewing reports including Survey Monkey, Zoomerang, SurveyGizmo, and Poll Daddy.
You may also want to evaluate some of the techniques used to promote your Town Hall Meeting to better understand how effective they are. For instance, did using Facebook and Twitter increase attendance? Are these tools helping you reach more people with your prevention message? CAPT offers Evaluating Social Media Efforts: One Approach to Consider to help you assess this growing method of outreach.
For Communities Talk: Town Hall Meetings to Prevention Underage Drinking, there are three main ways that SAMHSA collects evaluation information from communities: an Organizer Survey, an Event Recap, and a Participant Feedback Form. By sharing your information with SAMHSA, you help us tell your important story of prevention on a national scale, so please submit your information to us.
Organizer Survey
You should have received instructions for how to access and complete an online Organizer Survey after your first Town Hall Meeting event. While all organizations are strongly encouraged to complete the survey, organizations that accepted a planning stipend must complete a survey per their agreement in receiving the stipend. Contact eval@stopalcoholabuse.net for more information or to get a copy of the survey.
Event Recap
We want to share the impact of your event with the entire prevention field. Simply answer a few brief questions to be considered as a Town Hall Meeting success story. Log-in to your event profile and answer the brief Event Recap questions. You can also upload promotional materials, meeting videos and photos, and copies of media coverage to illustrate your success.
Participant Feedback Form
In addition, SAMHSA has asked a number of randomly selected event organizers to distribute 40 copies of a Participant Feedback Form at their events. If your organization was selected, please distribute the form to attendees and collect them, once completed. Return the completed forms to SAMHSA in the stamped, self-addressed envelope. Contact eval@stopalcoholabuse.net if you need the form in Spanish, cannot locate the return envelope, or if you have any questions.
Resources To Support Underage Drinking Prevention
The following free resources are available from the federal government:
- Alcohol’s Effects on the Brain (AlcoholFX) is a free, science-based app for tablets that teaches students ages 10–12 how alcohol can harm their brains if they drink. Based on lesson plans from SAMHSA’s Reach Out Now initiative, the app can easily integrate with instruction in fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms.
- Get the latest news in underage drinking prevention research from ICCPUD news.