Festivals bring people together to celebrate and nurture creativity – but how do you know if yours truly resonates with your audience?

Evaluating a festival’s effect is key to understanding what works, what doesn’t, and how you can make future events even better. That’s where the Impact & Insight Toolkit comes in!

Our evaluation approach provides a structured way to collect, analyse, and act on feedback. And the online platform we use, Culture Counts, has many handy features to make use of.

Why Use the Impact & Insight Toolkit and Culture Counts?

• Ready-to-Use Survey Templates: Want to hear from audiences, participants, peers, and creative practitioners? The Toolkit comes with ready-to-use survey templates to help you quickly and easily gather insights from different perspectives. Do you feel like some of the inbuilt questions aren’t suitable for you? That’s fine – you can delete them and add your own on the Culture Counts platform.
• Track Your Festival Goals: Every festival has big ambitions, but how do you know you’re achieving them? The Toolkit supports you to state these ambitions and track your progress against them, so you can see how well your intentions align with the actual experience of your audience.
• Flexible and Easy Data Collection: Whether you prefer online surveys, in-person interviews or QR codes, Culture Counts makes it simple to collect feedback in a way that suits your event. You can also compare responses from different groups to get a more complete picture of your festival’s effect.
• Reporting Options: Once you’ve gathered feedback, Culture Counts generates charts via an interactive dashboard and allows you to access your raw data. As a participant in the Toolkit project, you can check out ready-made reports, helping you identify trends, improve future events and demonstrate your festival’s value to stakeholders and funders. There are  various reporting options that help in analysing and interpreting the collected data.

Incorporating the Impact & Insight Toolkit into your festival evaluation strategy can lead to a deeper understanding of its effect, inform future programming decisions, and enhance stakeholder engagement. By utilising Culture Counts’ features and Toolkit resources, festival organisers can ensure their events continue to resonate with audiences and achieve their intended outcomes.

Common Festival Evaluation Challenges (And How to Handle Them!)

Even with the right tools, evaluating a festival isn’t always straightforward. Here are some common challenges organisers face and how Culture Counts can help overcome them.

Evaluating Multiple Events

The challenge: Many events and partners may combine to create a festival. Whilst there may be a few ambitions that are consistent across the festival, there will also be those that are specific to the individual events or organisation. How do we account for this?

Our recommendations:

• Use the flexibility of a survey’s design to ask which individual event(s) the respondent experienced
• Take advantage of the survey logic feature to guide respondents to the most relevant questions
• Use the share feature to co-design surveys and share data with other Culture Counts users

Getting a Wide Range of Feedback

The challenge:  Festivals are busy, and getting a diverse range of attendees to share their thoughts can be difficult. Some voices may go unheard.

Our recommendations:

• Use multiple survey delivery methods (online, interview, QR codes) to appeal to a larger variety of people
• Target surveys for specific groups, to ensure a more inclusive evaluation

Balancing Time and Resources

The challenge: With so much going on, festival teams often struggle to prioritise data collection. There is no capacity to conduct in-person interviews onsite.

Our recommendations:

• Set up your evaluation using a template to save time and streamline your survey
• Email the survey to those that purchased tickets and offer an incentive (if necessary!) to encourage participation.
• Display the automatically generated QR code for your survey at key locations (the exit, information point, and tea tent) for people to scan with their own devices
• Spot key insights quickly and in real-time with the visualisations generated in the Analytics Dashboard

 

Encouraging Honest Feedback

The challenge: Audience members and participants may hesitate to provide honest feedback due to concerns about anonymity or judgement.

Our recommendations:

• Inform would-be-respondents that Culture Counts surveys are anonymous; they will only be identifiable if they provide their name and full address in a free text box
• Gather feedback from peers and creative practitioners to ensure a balanced evaluation beyond audience perspectives

Measuring Outcomes for Different Stakeholders

The challenge: Festivals have multiple stakeholder groups (e.g., audiences, artists, funders) all with different priorities, making it hard to evaluate overall effect.

Our recommendations:

• Create separate surveys within one evaluation tailored to different groups.
• Understand and align stakeholder expectations and experiences; provide analysis relevant to them and their needs

Demonstrating Value to Funders and Stakeholders

The challenge: It can be challenging to translate qualitative feedback into quantitative data that resonates with funders.

Our recommendations:

• Showcase festival outcomes effectively via clear and automatically generated visualisations
• Articulate non-financial value to funders through the selection of carefully designed questions that align with your mission and your funders’ requirements

Tracking Long-Term Effectiveness

The challenge: Evaluating a festival’s effectiveness over time (e.g., year-on-year comparisons) requires consistent and structured data collection.

Our recommendations:

• Ensure consistent data collection practices through reusable templates.
• Track trends and measure improvements over multiple festivals using automated reporting options

Adapting to Different Festival sizes

The challenge: Small festivals might lack evaluation frameworks, while large festivals may have overly complex processes.

Our recommendations:

• Customise your evaluations on Culture Counts, based on your specific needs. They can be as simple or as complex as it appropriate for you.
• Utilise the variety of survey delivery options for a range of events, including virtual or hybrid.

 

Okay – so how might a survey for attendees to a festival look in practice? Using Culture Counts, we have created an example evaluation for a fictional festival, ‘All-Day Festival’.

Here is the link to the survey for festival organisers (self assessors) to complete before the day of the festival – https://uk.culturecounts.cc/s/7KujUK

Here is the link to the survey for festival attendees (public)  – https://uk.culturecounts.cc/s/4XVRiK

And, last but not least, here is the link to the survey for the local councillors (peer reviewers) – https://uk.culturecounts.cc/s/3fgyJD

You can answer them multiple times to really explore the surveys’ structures.

Why Festival Evaluation Matters

Evaluating your festival isn’t just about collecting data – it’s about using insights to improve future events, support decision-making, and strengthen relationships with funders and audiences. The Impact & Insight Toolkit can make the process smoother, ensuring you have the opportunity to address challenges effectively, enabling you to not only improve your events but also communicate their value more clearly to stakeholders, funders, and audiences alike.

Whether the festival you’re running is grassroots community-focussed or large-scale and commercially driven, taking the time to measure your effectiveness will help you create an even more meaningful experience and support future funding applications.

Give it a try!  Of course, if you need any support in designing an evaluation for your festival, get in touch with us at [email protected]

 

 

Featured image credit: SarahCreates on Unsplash