Audience evaluations from the Society for Technical Communication 2010 Summit just arrived in email. Whitney Hess says she finds the comments more useful than the numeric scores:

The comments are far more important to me than the scores, since they help me tweak the content and style for future gigs. My goal is to continually improve the clarity and effectiveness of my presentations to ensure I’m doing my best to help people learn, and scores alone just don’t give me enough information to go on.

Comments help presenters understand what’s important to audience members. I may use a particular image or piece of data to make a point, but an audience member may interpret it differently, or make an important observation that I can cite in future versions of the talk.

Whitney also makes a good point about the proportion of evaluations to attendees:

Of course I would have liked to have received feedback from more of the attendees, but the way STC Summit conducts these surveys doesn’t really encourage it — evals are filled out at computer stations in the hallway, instead of on paper at the end of each session.

Evaluation systems should require minimal effort to participate, or else they give an incomplete picture of the whole audience’s reaction to a talk. The 18 evaluations I received from an audience of 72 belie that. However, getting attendees to complete their evaluations online does enable faster distribution of results in a more useable format. STC deserves credit for this, and the challenge for them next year is to increase the proportion of evaluations to session attendees.

Web Technologies and Dynamic User Assistance Panel Discussion – May 4, 2010 11:30AM

According to room monitor counts, approximately 29 people attended your session. You received 6 evaluations and your scores are summarized below. Note: The evaluation scale ranged from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent).

		Your Scores	Average Scores	Maximum Possible Score
	Content	4.67	3.96	5.00
	Delivery	4.83	3.94	5.00

Audience Comments:

Hard to hear. Seemed to be more geared to web site and open site help, less to help that is embedded in an application or system.

A flood of good information.

While I found all these presenters to be knowledgeable on the topic of social media and dynamic user assistance, it was too basic/introductory for my purposes. Great info, but I didn’t learn anything new.

I think one of the main speakers was missing but I didn’t care–this was a very valuable discussion by folks who are obviously leaders in their field and in the industry–one of top two sessions I attended.

Designing for Collaboration: Managing Projects With a Wiki – May 5, 2010 9:45AM

According to room monitor counts, approximately 72 people attended your session. You received 18 evaluations and your scores are summarized below. Note: The evaluation scale ranged from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent).

		Your Scores	Average Scores	Maximum Possible Score
	Content	4.22	3.96	5.00
	Delivery	4.22	3.94	5.00

Audience Comments:

This session gave me needed direction for what and how I should create the wiki for my projects. I’ll be using this information Monday morning when I return to my client. A well organized and informative alert and engaged despite it being the morning after the banquet.

I would have liked to see more of the wiki and hear how it was constructed up front.

Nice that the topic addressed some of the issues that I am struggling with at work. Mr. Mader definitely “gets it.”

Very good overview material. It would be even better if more emphasis had been placed on case studies/examples.

This was a very instructive and helpful presentation with a solid speaker delivery. Stewart was responsive and educational when answering questions and Nicki helped add to the conversation and keep moving things along.

Nicky is always a solid presenter with excellent ideas to communicate. My first time seeing Stewart, and he is amazing! Lots to share, excellent humility, good knowledge. The description mentioned a live demo, but we didn’t see that (I would have liked a live demo as advertised).

Mr. Mader presented a clear and detailed outline of the benefits of collaborating via wiki, as well as a coherent, real-world example of wiki application in his own work. Many presenters favored one approach or the other, but it was very useful to have both.

Excellent presentation. Well-organized, content-rich, strong supporting visual aids, effective use of examples, dynamic and engaging delivery.

To me, Stewart is a good speaker but sometimes stated the obvious, repeated info in different ways, and went into way too much detail about what I felt were minor aspects.