Contact
Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen
Research assistent at Department of People and Society
Telephone: +4651167116, +46730577151
Evaluating your event helps to improve the organisation of future events. It is important to link the evaluation to the objective of the event: If the objective was networking, it is useful to focus on whether participants were able to expand their network. If the objective was innovation adoption, organisers need to monitor the participant’s inclination to adopt the demonstrated innovation.
Feedback can be gathered on the set-up (programme, lo- cations, facilities, topic, ...) and organisation of the demo, but also on what participants have learned, and what they believe to be applicable for their farm:
Shorter term: “What do visitors take home?"
Longer term: “What do visitors do with what they have taken home?”
This impact rarely comes from a demo alone, and is less straightforward to evaluate, because of the time lag. It takes time for participants to make actual changes in their farming practice, since it might require financial investments, new skills and knowledge, and a readjustment in the farmer’s usual routine and mind-set. The actual decision for change is also not influenced solely by the demonstration event, but includes a wide array of other information sources, such as publications in (agricultur- al) press, follow-up demo events, workshops, newsletters, contacts with advisors, other farmers, etc.
You can do the evaluation in different ways, such as:
Acting on the evaluation is important to improve future on-farm demonstration. So once the evaluation has been gathered it needs to be shared and improvements for future activities need to be implemented.
Use only a few and relevant questions. A questionnaire with many questions will be harder to get people to complete.
You are more likely to have success in collecting feedback on the day, than after- wards through email.
Source FarmDemo https://farmdemo.eu/hub/storage/doc/735_Design_guide_for_on-farm_demonstrations.pdf
Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen
Research assistent at Department of People and Society
Telephone: +4651167116, +46730577151