Evaluations: the end but also the beginning

I’ve just completed the evaluation for an event and it has been a very rewarding process. I can see positive results from the hard work and am able to see how we can improve on future events.

I am also helping with planning for ‘Fruit and Veg September’¹. I usually love the feeling of starting on a new project however this one felt a little overwhelming. The ‘2 Fruit and 5 Veg’ message seems simple, but the statistics highlight the challenges we face:

•  World Health Organisation attributes 1.7 million deaths per year due to inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption, making it one of the top 10 health risk factors face globally.²

• According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012 yearbook only 6% of Australians eat the recommended daily serves of both fruit and vegetables.³ 

So where do we start… by looking at past strategies and their evaluations. This helped me see what has worked in the past and what hasn’t. It helped identify local public perceptions and barriers to adoption of the 2 and 5 messages. I was also able to see where grants, donations and sponsorship have come from and what types of stories gained media coverage. After looking at the evaluations I didn’t feel so lost and was able to start setting goals and planning for ‘Fruit and Veg September’.

Just as they taught us at university, in strategic public relations the evaluation is not only the end of a cycle but the start of the next one.

 

1: http://www.crunchandsip.com.au/celebrate-crunchsip/fruit-veg-september/   

2:  http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/fruit/en/index2.html

3: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1301.0Main+Features2362012

Sunset Evaluations

Hi guys, this will be my last blog for this unit but I doubt it will be my last ever! I have chosen to look at the topic of evaluating within PR.

At Sunset Events, evaluations were made with the use of media monitoring, surveys and various figures such as sales. I was able to get some experience with 2 out of 3 of these evaluation methods. Throughout my internship I did a lot of media monitoring (both print and online). This involved searching through publications such as The Wire, X-Press and Drum Media (which wasn’t very painful to do!) in order to find articles related to Sunset Events and their festivals. Once the articles were found, I needed to scan and upload onto a document stating the date, publication and page number. However, sometimes it was hard to find all articles as a lot of the time Sunset was mentioned on cover pages or in just a timetable stating when the event was taking place. According to my communications manager, these were to be included in the document also! They were sometimes mistakenly missed when scanning.

I also did some online monitoring. Sunset had an outside company ‘Meltwater’ that would send through its online monitoring for them, but this wasn’t entirely accurate, so I was left scanning through the internet trying to find articles (Google news was a great help!). When it was time to report on the results of the media monitoring at the end of the festival, AVE’s were determined. I worked on calculating some values for the work I did, however, once I had the values my communications manager thanked me but then informed me that in the evaluation report, the AVE amounts were usually just estimated at $1,000,000! Does this then therefore diminish the AVE amounts??? In my opinion, they are not very accurate for the media monitoring Sunset does, as like I explained previously, monitoring includes just the mention of the Sunset name or an event name. So this really has no advertising value.

The other evaluation method I worked on was surveys. An online survey was sent out to ticket holders of the West Coast Blues ‘n’ Roots festival via Sunset database after the event had taken place. This survey evaluated results such as experience, favourite acts, prices, sponsors, green initiatives etc. I then wrote up a report with the results of this survey. Well know that you know a bit about evaluations at Sunset, I’ll now evaluate my internship for you!

Overall, it was a great experience! I really enjoyed working for the team and it was a fun, creative environment. I gained a lot of insight when it came to web, social media and other forms of online communication. I also received some great experience in terms of how to run and promote an event (it isn’t easy!) and got some great contacts in the industry J I really enjoyed the event side of both Marketing and PR and was grateful to Sunset for taking me on! How did everyone else evaluate their internships?? Hope they were a great experience as I’m sure they were!

Signing off for now,
Melissa
Curtin Bentley Campus