Conference Evaluations

1. The starting point is your calling us to talk about your project. We want to know things like how long your conference evaluation is, how many workshops or breakout sessions you have and how many attendees,  if one evaluation template is sufficient or if you need to have a customized conference evaluation form for each breakout session, whether you plan to print the forms yourself at the conference or prior to the event, if you collect the  evaluation forms separated out by session, if you want to scan the conference evaluations yourself, what kind of report you want, what your turn around time is, … All of this is  best discussed over the phone. It allows us to assess your project and prepare a quote.

2. All projects begin with the design of a custom conference evaluation form, which contains your questions and company/event title and logo in an format that makes it readable by our BubbleScan2xls OMR Software.  Forms can be single page, half-page, or multi-page. Many customers have a standard session or workshop evaluation form but want to be able to customize the form with the session/workshop name.  Some customers have one conference evaluation form that covers all the workshops and consists of multiple pages.  Please have a look at our sample forms. Whatever your requirements, we want to create a solution that works for you.

3. Our forms can be printed on regular paper (we suggest 24 or 28lb paper as it holds up a little better) from your laser printer (ink jets won’t work, sorry) or copier. This makes it possible to print forms on-site. For larger quantities it is often more cost-effective to print forms ahead of time.  We will gladly provide you with a quote for printed forms as well. When forms need to be cut you want to make extra sure that your printer pays attention. We have seen some very sloppy cutting jobs which rendered the resulting conference evaluation forms unreadable by our OMR software.  Needless to say, that this defeats the whole purpose of going with a machine-readable solution. Please consider buying forms from us, particularly when your forms need to be cut.

4. Once filled in and collected, your conference evaluation forms need to be scanned and processed. We can do this for you or you can do it yourself using your own document scanner or a rented scanner from us, and our BubbleScan2xls OMR Software, which you can rent for just the duration of your project or purchase. BubbleScan2xls drops data directly into a custom Excel spreadsheet. [By the way, the customization of the spreadsheet is part of the form design fee.]  Our spreadsheets utilize macros to perform the various data handling and report generation tasks. You initiate a macro task by clicking on a button. For instance, the button labeled “Review Data” will start a task that does exactly that, let you review the data.

5. All scanned and processed data needs to be reviewed. As much as we would like our solution to be 100% fool proof, it is not. There are generally two types of errors. The first type is an error detected by the BubbleScan2xls OMR Software and can be caused by a poorly printed (out of alignment) form, a poorly scanned form (specified the wrong page size, scanned image is too skewed (crooked), scanned upside-down, torn or bent corners, …). When the software reports such an error the Excel spreadsheet will not attempt to even show partial data, as there is no guarantee that that partial data is correct. Instead the spreadsheet displays such records as “error”. If you’ve scanned an entire batch upside down, we suggest you delete the errors from the spreadsheet and rescan. If the form is just a one-off, and that is usually the case, then your recourse is to manually enter the data directly into the spreadsheet. Our spreadsheet will make that a relatively painless undertaking by displaying the image of the form on the right side of your screen and positioning the cursor in the corresponding row in the RECORDS worksheet.

The second kind of error is one introduced by the attendees. A thin line through the bubble will in all likelihood not be detected by the OMR software, nor will a circle around the bubble or a check mark next to the bubble.  Our spreadsheet can be configured to look for forms that might fall into that category. We can either flag every unanswered question or flag forms with only X number of answered questions.

In addition, we always flag fields that have more than the allowed number of responses (that number is usually 1).  Our software cannot detect the difference between an erroneous  mark that was then crossed out (with a big, visible X) and a ‘normal’ mark.

The review process is highly recommended and is a rather straight forward process. You click the ‘Review Data’ button to start the process. Our macro code then crawls through the records looking for highlighted fields. When it finds such a field it displays the image of the evaluation form on your screen and places the cursor in field in question (or if the error is not field-specific, such as too few marks for the overall form, in the row for that record).

6. Last not least, you generate the report(s). Our spreadsheet comes with a standard frequency report that is generated as you click the ‘Report’ button. If your conference has individual sessions or workshops, you can click another ‘Report’ button and create an individual report (.xlsx) for each workshop. This makes it easy to email your instructors a report for just their workshop. These reports are automatically saved into the same directory as our spreadsheet and are named with the session ID and title.

If you have an event coming up and could benefit from automatic data capture, please contact us. Our objective is to create a custom solution that is easy to use and affordable. We would love to hear from you, today.