Survey Development

To have as robust an estimation of event (economic) impact as possible, host cities need to have detailed information on visitors, including information on where visitors come from i.e. what proportion of visitors are local residents, what proportion are coming from further away. This information can only be collected through visitor surveys.

Profile information is also likely to influence other elements of an event evaluation such as the extent of attendance/participation by specific target audience/group. Measuring this may then allow comparisons against local or national averages, or benchmarks from other events.

Why Measure Attendance?

• To assess the popularity or reach of the event, perhaps for logistical or PR reasons
• To evaluate performance indicators such as the number of young people attending
• To define the ‘event population’ so that other measures linked to economic, environmental or social impacts can be aggregated upwards to assess impact across the whole event.

There are a few issues to take into account when developing surveys to collect information on festival vistors:

• Sampling

• Surveying techniques

• Developing indicators

 

 

Further details on what to include to the visitor survey can be found in the intermediate economic impacts section.