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Analyze Program Outcomes

Overview

After your event ends, take a step back and ask: did it work? This article is about pulling together attendance, responses, and payments into one picture so you can answer that honestly — and decide what to change.

When to use: after the event ends, before you start planning the next one.

For the live monitoring view, see Track Participation & Responses. For the attendance details that feed into this analysis, see Review Activity Attendance. For turning insights into action, see Prepare for Your Next Program.

How It Works

The questions worth answering

Most program reviews come down to a handful of practical questions:

  • How many people registered, and how many actually showed up?
  • Which activities were most and least popular?
  • What did participants tell you in their answers?
  • How much did you collect in payments, and how much went to fees and refunds?
  • Did anything go differently than you planned, and why?

The goal is not a polished report — it is enough understanding to make next time better.

Pull the numbers together

There is no single "outcomes" page. The information lives in three places:

  • Attendance — see Review Activity Attendance
  • Responses — open Track and review answers to your program-level and activity-level questions
  • Payments — see Orders and Reporting, especially the Total Collected and Net Proceeds figures

If you regularly need a single combined view, export each and combine in a spreadsheet. See Export Data.

Useful comparisons

A few comparisons that consistently surface useful information:

  • Registered vs. attended (drop-off) — a 25% drop-off may be normal; a 60% drop-off probably means something to investigate.
  • Activity demand — sort activities by attendance count and waitlist size to see which were genuinely popular vs. just well-attended because they were the only option.
  • Question responses — if you asked satisfaction or preference questions, look at the spread of answers and skim free-text comments for repeated themes.
  • Money in vs. money out — gross collected, refunds issued, fees absorbed or passed through. Net Proceeds tells you what actually landed in your bank.

Note what changed across the lifecycle

Programs evolve while they are running. It is worth noting:

  • Did you add or drop activities mid-flight?
  • Did capacity change, and how did the waitlist behave as a result?
  • Were any communications sent late or reactively?

These details fade fast — capture them in a short post-program note while they are fresh.

Tips & Best Practices

  • Decide before launch what "success" looks like (attendance count, satisfaction score, revenue target) so you have something to compare against
  • Track the same handful of figures across programs — trends over time are more useful than any single number
  • Talk to staff and volunteers; their observations catch things the numbers miss
  • Write a short post-program note for the team and save it with the program — future you will thank you