Stress Test Provides Feedback

Stress tests have leaped from the doctor's office to the bank examiner's office. Soon you may (or may not) know more about how healthy your mega-bank is. What about your favorite run/walk event? How does it do on a stress test?

As an event director, our stress test comes in the form of our post-event surveys. Your feedback provides valuable information about how we are doing. In the spirit of transparency, we want you to know the results.

Our survey after the recent St Patrick's Day Human Race is now complete. We had more than 400 responses, which is 25% of the people receiving the survey link via E-mail. That is considered a high rate (at little as 10% could be statistically valid).

The Results
The six most important things to respondents are listed below. In parentheses next to each item is their importance to respondents and an approval rating, each achieved based on a five-point scale with 1.0 the lowest, 3.0 neutral, and 5.0 the highest.

1. Official results posted online (importance=3.01/approval=4.16)
2. Course (3.0/4.25)
3. Restrooms (2.87/3.63)
4. Event date (2.79/3.97)
5. Headquarters (2.69/4.02)
6. Refreshments (2.44/3.59)

The good news is that, in those six key categories, we performed pretty well. We consider any approval rating below 4.0 something we need to work on. That leaves three areas to address.

Event date and headquarters are linked: our date is fixed by the availability of facilities at the University of St Thomas. Our event is held on the first Sunday of their Spring Break so we have access to indoor facilities. Next year, things are a little uncertain, since the University of St Thomas will be building a new field house. We won't know until later in the year what that means for our event date and HQ.

We know restrooms are important to runners and walkers. At 3.63, the score wasn't terrible, but needs some work. The biggest piece of advice we got was that people wanted porta-potties near the 8K start at Prior. We are looking into options for doing that.

Refreshments did okay at 3.59, and even earned rave reviews for the trail mix from Great Harvest. We'll work to enhance our offerings for 2010.

Our Web Site
We also asked you about our web site. It got higher marks than last year (we overhauled the site last April), and you really like the results features. However, many people had problems with the maps and some didn't like the site navigation. We are moving to a new mapping tool (MapMyFitness) that should greatly improve the maps we use, and are looking at the best ways to address the navigation issues. We have also made some updates to our online registration process. Most people flew through it with no problems, but the ones who had problems got really frustrated. We've eliminated a couple potential issues that should smooth things out for most people.

Action Questions
The most powerful questions on the survey where the three 'action' questions. Here is how we did on them:

1. How likely are you to return next year? 90.8% likely or very likely
2. Would you recommend this event to a friend? 90.7% likely or very likely
3. Would you participate in another TSL event? 83.0% likely or very likely

Finally, when we asked you to describe the event, the most common words and phrases used were:

• "fun"
• "well-organized"
• "great course"
• "friendly"

Of course we did receive a few responses like "waste of money," "too expensive, especially on race day" and "not sure what the event has to do with St Patrick's Day or humans." We know we can't please everyone, and want to make sure people know what the event is about when they choose to participate.

Conclusion
Our stress test provides us some directives to make our events better. The funny thing is that I feel less stress just knowing what you are thinking. Thank you for sharing!