Asking your participants to rate aspects of your program makes them partners in the success of the academy and gives you valuable information for the next round. All communities conduct weekly evaluations and a few conduct overall evaluations at the end of the program.

Weekly evaluations

You can solicit feedback on a variety of factors, including:

• Organization of each presentation
• Clarity of presenters
• Effort made to engage participants
• Presenters' effectiveness in answering questions
• Most enjoyable and least enjoyable aspects of each session
• Topics to be expanded next time
• Topics to be abbreviated or eliminated next time
• Amount of time available for discussion
• General suggestions for improving the session
• Ease or difficulty in finding the meeting location, if applicable
• Rating of the food served

Collecting these evaluations at the end of each evening will give you immediate, concrete feedback that can be shared with the presenters. Just be aware that this instant feedback is extremely subject to both good and bad influences, such as a particularly great meal or a speaker's uncooperative laptop.

Click to view or download a sample weekly evaluation form, a composite of the best of those in use in other communities.

Overall evaluation

In an overall evaluation, you are asking participants to consider the entire program, so their recollections may be less specific (particularly about earlier sessions) but more thoughtful. Present this evaluation as their opportunity to help you strengthen the program for the next group of participants. Questions are generally more open-ended, such as:

• Did the program schedule work for you as an employee or family member? What changes could we make to better accommodate someone in your situation?
• What were your favorite sessions? What stood out about those sessions?
• What were your least favorite sessions? Can you suggest any changes to improve the presentation of those topics?
• Was there any topic you had hoped to cover that was omitted or given too little attention?
• Would you have preferred that all sessions end promptly at the stated time, or did you support the group's decision to stay later on certain evenings?
• Were you satisfied with the amount and type of food served?
• Would you be interested in attending periodic follow-up sessions, a few times a year, to keep you informed about topics in the local news?

To encourage honest feedback, your best option is to send out this type of evaluation a week to ten days after graduation. Providing a stamped, self-addressed envelope may improve your response rate. Another option would be to set up the survey online, if most of your participants have easy access to the Internet and your information technology staff is able to support that approach.

Click to view or download a sample overall evaluation form.