Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Hey Fletch … We are attempting to develop some type of post-ministry evaluation form for the purpose of getting feedback from attendees of selected ministries or outreach events. Do you all have any samples of this type of document?
DRF—Nice to hear from you and what a great looking website your church has … clean, easy to read, informative!
Let me applaud you for wanting metrics from attendees of events. These are “leading indicators” of how a church is doing. There is a great article in the KPI library on Lagging and Leading Indicators. In it is this illustration: “For many of us a personal goal is weight loss. A clear lagging indicator that is easy to measure. You step on a scale and you have your answer. But how do you actually reach your goal? For weight loss there are 2 “leading” indicators: 1. Calories taken in and 2. Calories burned. These 2 indicators are easy to influence but very hard to measure. When you order lunch in a restaurant the amount of calories is not listed on the menu. And if you are me, you have no clue how many calories you burn on a given day.”
In the church, counting how many people are at an event is a lagging indicator. You are going for the gold, the leading indicator. This is the metric of “what did those people experience when they were at the event.”
Generally, paper response forms don’t work but they do litter your campus. An electronic response form on the free SurveyMonkey might get some answers. Likert scale responses (“1” is low and “7” is high, pick one) are quick response mechanisms that can give good data. The best data is the first person response, “I went to the event with my family and I was a little nervous bringing our young kids. Everyone made it so easy for us in the nursery and we enjoyed the marriage seminar.”
The best responses that I have received are email based. After an event, try sending out an email to the attendees. Make it short and simple. Only ask for feedback in the email, with no pitch for future events. Select open ended questions, such as: 1) What was a high point for you at the event? 2) What could we do to better next time? 3) What three words come to your mind about the presentation at the event?
Let me know what you decide to do.
