Assignment Task - Case Study Proposal

Select an event for evaluation. The event must be either cultural, sporting, or business.

The event must be held after week 7 and before week 11 of this session ie between 21st April and 14th May.

It should be a local event held within the region of the student's current residence. A mega-event cannot be selected for this assessment task.

VERY IMPORTANT - Some events will not be suitable for the case study. In particular, events that are regularly held - monthly or weekly markets, a pub, club or theatre show, sporting contests.

The assignment is in two parts -

Using report format and style:

Part 0ne
• Describe the event - its program, location, duration, and its marketing.
• Describe the purpose, aims and objectives of the event in measurable terms
• Describe how the aims and objectives relate to the event's program elements.

Part Two
Describe, justify and explain:
• Identify the possible impacts the event will have on the host community
• the process you will use to assess/evaluate the event organisation's success in achieving aims & objectives in order to complete Assignment 3,.
• the process you will use to assess/evaluate the event's impacts on the host community in order to complete Assignment 3,.

Part one is straight forward simply describe the event - program, location, duration (what, where, when), describe the purpose, goals and objectives of the event (who, why), and describe the marketing of the event. The most difficult part of the task may be uncovering the events aims and objectives.

Part two - describe methods you will use to evaluate the event in order to complete assignment three.

What is wanted in part two of assignment two is for you to tell me how you are going to do assignment three which is a report on the event nominated in assignment two using the triple bottom line approach to -

identify and critically analyse the positive and negative economic, environmental, sociocultural impacts of the event;

analyse success or failure in attaining the event's aims and objectives:

provide recommendations about the impacts and attaining the aims and objectives which identify issues relevant to the event organisers.

Therefore - In part two of assignment two you need to describe the process you will use to evaluate

The impacts (economic, social, environmental) the event had, and the event's success (or not) in meeting its aims and objectives

There are a number of possible processes -
Observational empirical evidence,
media coverage,
organiser' reports,
audience survey.

Choose one or more of these processes according to your ability to conduct the evaluation, and the nature of the event. For example a large 3 day music festival will be very difficult for one person to assess, but a combination of observation, media and reports would perhaps be possible, whereas a small afternoon event could be evaluated using survey and empirical evidence.

If you intend using a survey, you will need to include -
what questions will be in the survey,
who you are intending to survey,
when you will do it,
how you will do it, and,
how will you analyse and report on your survey findings.

It should be possible for you to access the event's website (or you could talk to the organisers directly) to discover the event's aims and objectives, and put these into your assignment.

What you also need to do is find a measuring process to see if the aims and objectives met or not.

If the aims are stated in terms such as - the event's aim is to increase tourism to the town, then it will be necessary to measure success or not by observing if there were tourists in town and estimating how many, or asking people if they are tourists, or asking hotels if there was an increase in bookings.

If the event's objective is an attendance of say, 500 people, attendance numbers could be gauged by obtaining actual attendance figures from tickets sold, or numbers of empty seats.

If the events mission is to raise $40,000 for a local charity; ask the organisers the amount of money raised (after expenses).

The difficulty is of course when these sorts of objectives are implied, assumed, or vaguely worded. In which case, you will need to dig deep into the event organisation's public statements.

Be careful not to assume. If the organisers say an aim is to increase overnight visitation, you have to ask - by how much? From what base figure to what target?

The same applies to vague aims of increasing economic activity or employment. Otherwise how can you measure success or not?

A method to use is to investigate the event's promotional material to look for clues on why the event is being held.

The challenge in assignment two is to uncover aims and objectives;

identify the potential positive and negative economic, environmental, sociocultural impacts of the event;

decide the measurements of event success and impacts;

create a means of verifying and recording the measurements;

create a means for evaluating your evidence.