Todd Parker, the promoter and race director for the Tour de Ste. Genevieve Road Race, sent me a nervous-sounding email this morning. Over the weekend he had over 250 competitors, 65 volunteers, 8 officials, and an unknown number of spectators attend the race. An event of this size simply does not happen in a community without the blessing of that community.
Todd therefore thought it would be a good idea to come back to Ste. Genevieve's leadership with a report of how the race went. He basically wanted to show how the race was a good thing for the community. Of course to do that he'd need to collect as much information from the people who'd attended the race as possible.
He was nervous because this wasn't something he'd thought of before today. A race director / promoter has ten thousand details to attend to leading up to a race. The last thing on his mind was anything post-race.
So that was the purpose of the email and the reason for his nervousness. Todd wanted to know if there was some way to survey everyone involved with the race to get the data he needed for his report. And it had to be done soon. Once an event is over, everyone's on to the next thing. Memory and attention spans are short. You only have so long to get valuable and meaningful feedback.
So I put together a quick survey, an image of which you can see below. I asked visitors to tell us:
- How they participated at the race
- Whether they visited Ste. Genevieve alone or with others
- Whether they'd stayed overnight in the area
- How much they spent
- Whether they had plans to come back
- ... You get the idea
I was able to get the survey up and running that afternoon, and by the weekend we had well over 150 responses. Todd was pretty happy with the number and quality of results. He had all the survey feedback he needed to create his report to present to Mayor of Ste. Genevieve and the Board of Aldermen.
