We were lucky enough to be invited to evaluate the ‘We Invented the Weekend’ festival at Salford Quays in June 2024. The festival is busy! It attracts thousands of visitors and has; performances, tents, music, shopping, sports, boats, cyclists, dancers, parades, talks – you name it and it is probably taking place across the site. Evaluating something like this requires a lot of energy and luckily The Evaluator has been honing its festival approach for many years now. We don’t often get to work next to celebrities like Bluey and Supertato though! Not forgetting the Gladiators and Mr Motivator!

You can read more about the We Invented The Weekend festival here.

We worked with an amazing team of volunteers and two giant dice to collect feedback at the weekend festival. We are very proud to say that across two sites, with a really small evaluation team, we were able to collect almost 500 completed feedback surveys during the weekend itself. We also created a brand-new game which worked really well, involving a giant dice and questions which aligned to the dice roll. This means that we have really good results across a wide cross section of people, great sample sizes and very good data.

Whilst there, we also carried out extensive footfall counting, to allow us to create a robust estimate of footfall over the whole weekend.

Our surveys are still live for this project and we are looking forward to collecting and analysing all the data over the summer months.

You might spot us at the next couple of festivals we are working on; these are ‘The Festival of Culture’ in Nelson in June and also ‘The National Festival of Making’ in July.

You can see more about The Festival of Culture here, and you can see more about The National Festival of Making here.

We actually evaluate the number of festivals and are happy to come along and support data collection if needed. Our festival analysis includes audience profiles, quality measures, practical experience and ways to improve, alongside footfall and economic impact. We would be happy to have a chat if you have a festival, that you would like to know more about, evaluating. You can call us on 01756 532 538 or email: info@theevaluator.co.uk