Background:

The Minnesota Association for Children's Mental Health (MACMH) is an organization that is dedicated to improving the quality of life of children with mental health disorders, equipping their parents with skills to care for their children, and educating the public to remove common misconceptions. Every year, MACMH hosts the largest statewide conference in the nation aimed at educating parents, caregivers, and professionals about new techniques and strategies. The conference also provides a forum for the attendees to share experiences and valuable information about working with children with disorders and their families. The conference includes over 70 separate sessions that are led by different presenters. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the conference and ensure that MACMH was inviting the right speakers and providing adequate information, MACMH sought OMS to collaborate on the conference evaluation.

Action:

To provide MACMH with a comprehensive conference evaluation, OMS suggested creating overall event surveys, supplemented with individual session surveys. The overall evaluation consisted of general questions about attendees' satisfaction with the facility, food, materials, etc. The surveys for the break-out sessions were geared more specifically toward speaker presentation and the information presented. OMS then provided each presenter with his/her own session survey results and supplied the conference organizers a composite report.

Results:

Due to the flexible nature of data collection and reporting, OMS was able to supports MACMH's goals in a number of ways. The feedback we gathered enabled MACMH to improve the conference from year to year and ensured that they were fulfilling conference mission. In addition, the information about the individual presenters gave insight into which presenters were best received and what kind of information the attendees wanted to hear. This approach made it possible for MACMH to make better decisions about which speakers to invite the following years, and also gave presenters specific feedback on their contributions to the event.