Remark Office OMR assists with data collection and analysis of conference evaluation forms

Introduction

Find out how a non-profit organization uses Remark Office OMR to seamlessly process thousands of different conference evaluation sheets of varying length and content.

Background

A non-profit organization looks to collect and analyze data from a variety of conference activities. All organizations that host conferences look to gather feedback from members and attendees in order to improve future conferences. Session and other conference evaluations provide direct feedback on how speakers, topics and general conference items are performing.

Overview

The Remark Office OMR software was used to collect and analyze data from the conference evaluation forms distributed during the annual conference. The conference has four categorized types of sessions; one evaluation form was created for each of the four types. The evaluation forms are designed to ask participants about their experience in the various sessions to gauge their overall experience and essentially gather feedback about the sessions.

• The first type of evaluation forms are for the pre-conference and post-conference workshops. These workshops are designed to have a small classroom setting with about 30-45 participants per workshop. There were about 20 workshops, some offered as full day sessions and others as half day.
• The second type of evaluation forms are for the general con-current sessions which are about 45 minutes and offered during the conference. There were about 400 separate sessions with 6 major tracks. During these sessions, there is an opportunity for the participants to fill out the evaluation form.
• The third type of evaluation forms are for the discussion groups. These sessions are also about 45 minutes and set up as round table discussions where participants come to engage in the conversation. Instead of a full presentation with Q&A, these sessions are shorter discussion topics and offer great networking opportunities.
• The fourth type of evaluation forms are for keynote speakers. There is an opening keynote and a closing keynote, typically at the beginning and end of the whole event. Conference attendees are also asked to evaluate the keynotes.

The Challenge

During the conference there were a total of about 4,700 evaluation forms from all four sessions. Of the four types of distributed evaluation forms, the con-current session evaluation forms were the group that returned the most forms. There were about 3,800 con-current session evaluation forms that were returned. The con-current sessions are highly attended because the sessions come as part of the registration fee where someone who registers to attend the conference can go to an unlimited number of con-current sessions.

With all the collected evaluation forms separated into folders, the organization needed a way to pull the information from the hard-copy forms into a format where reports can be generated and the collected data can be analyzed.

The Solution

The Remark Office OMR software played an enormous role in the collection and analysis of the conference evaluation forms. With no prior experience using the Remark Office OMR software, our user was able to quickly operate the software to get the conference evaluation forms processed.  The software allowed her to scan the evaluation forms into the software which saved a lot of data entry time and cut down on data entry errors. According to her, “Using the software minimized the number of opportunities to make mistakes.”

After scanning the conference evaluation forms into Remark Office OMR, the software’s built-in analysis program, Remark Quick Stats®, was used to generate three essential reports:

1. 1)The Question Mean Report which provides the mean for every question tabulated
2. 2) The Condensed Item Analysis Report which shows a question by question breakdown of responses including answer frequency and the mean.
3. 3) The Comment Report which shows snapshots of the handwritten responses.

These reports were saved as PDFs and sent to the presenters so that they were able to see results plus comment areas. The results are also reviewed by the conference team to review the various workshops, presenters and content topics.

Favorite Features

Our user mentioned that Remark Office OMR was instrumental to their evaluation process. She appreciated the product tutorials, how to videos and described the material as being very informational and detailed. She was impressed by the amazing product support and liked that they were highly accessible and responsive to her needs. Her favorite features are the automated reports, specifically the Question Mean Report, the software accuracy and recognition ability.

Download a free demo of Remark Office OMR to try it out for yourself!