How we discovered our first statewide call was a success

If you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing.

When we decided to launch our first statewide State of the State call, we outlined three objectives:

• Provide information about the impact of the Coronavirus in Indiana in our four areas of focus: healthcare, education, economic development, and civil society

• Share information about the regional challenges and opportunities around our state with a statewide audience

• Inspire ideas on how the state could emerge stronger than when we started

Our presenters targeted their content towards meeting these goals. To find out if we succeeded, we needed a way to measure the change in our audience’s understanding of these topics. So, we conducted the same survey before and after our attendees joined our call. The questions on the survey corresponded with our objectives.

Here are the results, comparing the audience’s answers before and after the call (average score is out of 5, with Strong Disagree being a 1 and Strong Agree being a 5):

We can see that there was numeric improvement with each metric, usually moving scores from about 3 to about 4. We also see tighter clustering around the more “educated” (right) side of the scoring spectrum. This showed us that our call achieved our goals. We’ll be applying similar thinking and measurement to other areas of MDLF, to make sure we’re constantly improving and to calculate the return on the resources we invest in events.

If your organization is thinking about how to measure the output you’re getting from finite resources, consider copying our approach!