Introducing Measure the Experience: A More Human Way to Evaluate In Person

If you are organising a festival, outdoor arts event, public programme or community celebration, gathering useful feedback can be harder than it looks.

People are tired of surveys.

They are asked to rate everything now: a delivery, a phone call, a chatbot, a button they pressed in an app. Even tiny interactions generate a request for feedback. So by the time someone gets to a genuinely brilliant free festival, family event or public programme, the word “survey” can already feel like a burden.

That is a problem for organisations doing good work.

Many of our clients put huge amounts of time, care and money into creating something generous, joyful and memorable for the public. They deserve feedback that helps them understand what worked, what it meant and what to do next. But at busy events, standard evaluation methods can sometimes feel like part of the problem rather than the answer.

That is why we created Measure the Experience.

Measure the Experience is our pop-up evaluation booth for festivals and events. It is designed to make feedback feel fun, welcoming and adaptable, with a giant dice, a mock vocal booth, a quick visual “perspective point,” a quieter seated survey option, stickers, and a self-contained setup that can sit alongside structured footfall counts.

Why we made it

We created Measure the Experience to tackle survey fatigue.

The issue was not that people had nothing to say. It was that they were fed up with being asked in dull, repetitive ways. Traditional in-person evaluation can feel like interruption. A clipboard appears, someone braces themselves, and the interaction starts to feel like admin.

That is the exact opposite of what you want at a festival.

At a good event, people are already full of impressions, feelings, memories and reactions. The challenge is not whether insight exists. The challenge is how to gather it in a way that feels proportionate to the setting and appealing enough that people actually want to take part.

So we built something different.

What makes it work

The reason Measure the Experience works is simple: we go to people, and we make the process enjoyable.

Instead of asking festival-goers to stop what they are doing and complete something worthy but boring, we create a small invitation that feels like part of the atmosphere. It is playful. It is visible. It is easy to understand. It gives people a chance to chat, reflect or react without feeling they have signed up to “do evaluation.”

That matters because once the interaction feels lighter and more human, people engage much more naturally.

They can roll the dice, answer a prompt, speak into the booth, react visually, or choose a quieter survey route instead. The setup is flexible because people are different. Some want to talk. Some want to write. Some want a very quick interaction. Some are drawn in by the playfulness. Some are relieved that there is a quieter option where they can sit and take their time.

That mix is built into the design.

A more human way to gather better data

Public events are mixed by nature.

You are dealing with families, older people, people in a rush, people who are curious, people who are shy, and people who would never stop for a formal questionnaire but will happily roll a giant dice and tell you something honest.

That is exactly the point.

We are not trying to make evaluation look serious. We are trying to make it easy enough, warm enough and interesting enough that people give us better information.

One of the things we noticed early on was that people wanted to engage more than we first expected. We originally kept parts of the interaction very short. But once people got involved, many wanted to talk for longer. They enjoyed the process. So we created more room for responses, because the playful format was unlocking richer reflection than a standard tick-box approach would have done.

When people do not feel cornered by evaluation, they often become much more generous with their thoughts.

We also developed tearing-paper demographic tools alongside it. These work almost like a tiny piece of origami in the middle of a busy day: very fast, very light, but still giving us the key profile information we need. That helps us gather useful audience data without making people feel they are filling in a form.

Built for real events

Measure the Experience is especially well suited to festivals, fireworks, outdoor arts, public realm events and busy community celebrations. It also works indoors anywhere there is a lot happening and people are moving through a shared experience.

It has been designed for real event conditions: a small footprint, battery lighting, no need for mains power, and enough flexibility to gather experiential feedback alongside structured footfall counts.

That practicality matters just as much as the creativity. A good evaluation tool has to work in the real world.

Caption: A self-contained event evaluation setup that can gather audience feedback and support structured footfall counts.

What it captures that standard surveys miss

Standard surveys are good at some things. They can be tidy. They can be efficient. They can help with consistent measures.

But what they often miss at public events is tone, texture and meaning.

What made someone come along?
What surprised them?
What felt important?
What was interesting enough that they remembered it in the middle of a busy day?
Why does an event like this matter in a place like this?

Those are exactly the kinds of prompts Measure the Experience is built to unlock, through open questions, voice recording and simple guided reflection. The prompt set can include questions about what brought people there, what interested them, why events matter, how long they stayed and what they spent.

That kind of feedback is often much more useful than another set of flat satisfaction scores on their own.

Why this matters to us

We do not think in-person evaluation should feel like being cornered by a clipboard.

We think it should feel proportionate to the experience people are having. If someone is at a lively public event, the feedback method should have some life in it too. It should meet people where they are. It should feel welcoming. And it should be good enough to produce insight that clients can actually use.

That is what Measure the Experience is for.

It takes human beings to the place, makes feedback enjoyable again, and helps us capture the stories, reflections and reactions that explain what an event really meant.

Because if the experience was memorable, the evaluation should not be forgettable.

Planning a festival, outdoor event or public programme?

Measure the Experience helps you gather useful feedback without making evaluation feel like an interruption. If you want a more human way to understand what your audience experienced, we would be happy to talk.