How to Survey and Evaluate Your Recreation Programs

You should make it a priority to survey and evaluate every aspect of your operation before, during and after all recreation programs. You won’t really know how things are going without getting detailed feedback from everyone involved. This process is ongoing with the majority of compiling the information taking place after the program ends. Here are some guidelines on how the ongoing evaluation process can work:

Pre-Program

Pull your evaluation from the previous year and review notes as soon as you start the planning process.
Incorporate this process into your staff meetings and trainings to review all the things that came up and how you can improve.
Make a plan to avoid your shortfalls from last year and implement improvements.

During the Program

Keep a log on all incidents that occur or things that come up throughout the program. Include all the positives on what’s going well and any negatives on what’s not working.
Constantly get feedback from your staff both individually and as a group.
Talk to parents, volunteers and participants to gather more valuable feedback on their experiences or suggestions.

Post-Program

Survey parents or adult participants on all aspects of the program to include feedback on the activities, schedules, facilities, staff, etc.
Organize your notes from the program to add to your post-evaluation.
Survey your staff on their feedback and experience.
Hold a post-program meeting with all your staff and volunteers to go through survey results as a group and gain additional feedback.
Compile your notes, staff feedback and parent surveys into an evaluation report. Make sure to note all the things that came up, what went wrong or didn’t work, what went right and worked well, and any opportunities to improve.

Program Surveys

Surveying parents, adult participants and staff is an essential part of the evaluation process to ensure you get honest, unbiased feedback. Many times you will see responses on issues you had no idea was an issue until it comes out on a survey. The same goes for positive feedback that you may not have realized was making such a great impact. Be as thorough as possible. Since you will only get one chance to get their feedback, make sure the information you gather is useful. There are many online survey tools you can use to help do surveys. Here are some examples on questions you can ask in a survey:

Parent or Adult Participant Survey

Keep these anonymous so you get the most truthful answers. Start by asking some background information. Different groups of participants will have different types of answers, so it’s good to filter these. Here are some suggestions on survey information:

Use both multiple choice and open ended questions.
Ask questions on where they saw your program advertised to help with marketing.
Ask if they would recommend the program to a friend and if not, why?
Ask if they would be returning next year and if not, why?
Ask about their favorite parts of the program.
Ask what they didn’t like.
Ask questions on how the schedule worked.
Ask questions on communication/organization of the program.
Ask questions on their experience with staff.
Ask questions on your facilities.
Set up a ranking system and let them rank all aspects of the program
Get their overall experience and suggestions for improvement.
You can expect to get about 10-20% of parents respond to your surveys. If you’ve never done surveys before, it will be more to start. Once you do them regularly it will tail off slightly.
If you are able to offer entry into a raffle for a prize as an incentive to fill out your survey you will see more results.

Staff Surveys

Make these mandatory for all staff to complete during their last week of recreation programs. You should know who filled out each survey but when you release the results in your reports you can compile it anonymously to allow for open discussion. However, you can always encourage them to share their responses with the group if they want to. Let staff know how the process will work so you get honest answers.

Ask similar questions as above on feedback on what worked and what didn’t work.
Ask feedback about their training and how it can be improved.
Find out what you can provide them before and during the program to make them better prepared and make their job easier.
Ask about their experience working with other staff and how the team functioned throughout the program.
Ask about the communication from you and other staff.

Evaluation Reports

When you have your notes organized and have compiled your parent and staff surveys, it’s time to put it all together in a single report. Your report should have four main components below. You can always add to this to be even more thorough and customize it to fit your recreation programs.

Program outline. The program outline is just an overview of your program. It can include how many participants you had, dates, where you promoted or advertised, when you took registration and how it went, summary of activities, etc.
Survey results. These are just the raw unedited results to your parent and staff surveys compiled as a group. You don’t need to have every individual survey here just the compiled answers to all your questions.
Incidents, glitches, what didn’t go well.This is a list of everything that came up during the program or things that may not have worked as well as you planned. You pull these from your notes and all the feedback you received.
Opportunities to improve. This is where you list solutions and improvements on how you can move the program forward as well as avoid shortfalls from the past. From this, develop a plan on how to implement these improvements.

Fine tuning and staying on top of this process is essential to identifying issues within your recreation programs and finding opportunities to improve. Parents, adult participants and staff will appreciate being heard and will notice when you take action on their feedback. Ignoring the survey and evaluation process will always put you behind and not allow you to move forward or advance your program to meet the needs of your staff and participants. Put the needed effort into this process and take it seriously to make sure your program is operating at the highest level.