Government Services Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians

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GSACEP used Survey On The Spot to gather lecture evaluations for our Continuing Medical Education (CME) conference.  Conference organizers must be able to show that they are evaluating lecturers and content to award CME credit for their event, and Survey On The Spot has made the process of gathering that feedback much easier.

"We used Survey On The Spot on attendees’ personal iPhones, smartphones, and over the internet for a 4 day conference with over 150 attendeees and 27.75 hours of CME available.  After each lecture, a slide was displayed with the lecture survey code and a QR code that attendees could scan that took them directly to the survey through Survey On The Spot. Survey On The Spot provided us with immediate feedback on lecturers, as well as significant increased the number of people who submitted feedback.  Plus, we did it in a way with much less impact on the environment."

Problem

GSACEP needed to:

• Radically improve response rates for attendee feedback
• Gain immediate feedback from event participants
• Store and present data in a easily accessed and manipulated format

How Survey On The Spot helped:

Survey On The Spot allowed us to create a single survey for each lecture.  Previously, we had used a Scantron program, which required distributing paper and pencil for each participant for each lecture.  Participants would hand write comments on the lecture, but those comments were only able to be accessed on the original document, which had to be turned in to the national ACEP organization and would often be lost to the lecturer as a source of feedback. From an attendee standpoint, it made submitting lecture evaluations much faster.  We incentivized filling out the surveys by tying our annual door prize to participation; for each evaluation completed, the attendee was entered once into a drawing for a new iPad.

Gather lecture evaluation information:

• Rating scales on lecture content, lecturer performance, and quality of audiovisuals
• Free text entry of comments on lecture immediately available for feedback

Survey access options:

• Multiple options were provided for attendees to access the surveys
   - Location based service on iPhone app
   - Custom survey code that linked to mobile conference page with all surveys listed
   - Unique survey code for each lecture
   - QR code linked to each lecture evaluation
   - Internet links from GSACEP’s website

Gathering CME information:

• Each participant must report how many hours of CME attended
• Survey On The Spot used to gather this information
• Excel sheet download used to mail merge into CME certificate, creating certificates in seconds

Overall Performance:

• Improved  lecture evaluation rate from 6.9% in 2010 using a Scantron system to 41.3% in 2011 using Survey On The Spot
• Sorting of evaluations in preparation for scanning and processing of the results with the paper based system used to take over 8 hours, at a cost of $150/hour for our executive director
• Lecture evaluations are automatically sorted and presented in a usable format, eliminating over 8 hours of work
• CME certificate processing can be done instantly and take seconds, rather than days using a paper based system
• Eliminated reams of paper waste

How other conference and event organizers can use SurveyOnTheSpot

By implementing SurveyOnTheSpot, conference organizers can:

• Greatly improve attendee feedback rates
• Decrease post event processing of feedback results from days to seconds
• Store evaluation results in easily accessed formats that can be shared with lecturers and other decision makers in the conference planning process