The City of Cockburn is a growing and vibrant community located in the southern suburbs of Perth, on Whadjuk Nyungar Boodjar (the land of the Whadjuk Nyungar people) between the coast and Jandakot Airport.
The City takes pride in delivering events that invite residents and visitors to come together, collaborate and celebrate the vibrant spirit of the Cockburn community.
Requirements
The City partnered with Culture Counts to evaluate key events for the City of Cockburn’s 2023-2024 summer event season including:
- Coogee Beach Festival 2024: a community festival event on the Coogee Beach foreshore with activities and entertainment celebrating Australian culture, cultural diversity and community spirit.
- Beeliar Sun Sets 2023-2024: taking place in November 2023 (Yangebup) and February 2024 (Success), the City hosted two free live music events that featured headline and local music acts, food trucks, bouncy castles, giant games and a silent disco.
- Coogee Live 2024: a vibrant and inclusive weekend festival held at Coogee Beach. Building on its success as a finalist for the best Australian community event in 2023, the 2024 festival featured a diverse range of activities catering to families, community groups, and arts lovers.
“Communicating our value to our internal and external stakeholders has been amplified by using Culture Counts.”Marie La Frenais, City of Cockburn Visit the website
Approach
Culture Counts recommended an integrated evaluation plan to enable the City of Cockburn to collect, measure and report their key strategic priorities across the three major events.
Culture Counts worked with the City to develop a survey framework that would maintain data collection consistency and offered data collection strategies to maximise their internal staffing and budget resources (this included the use of QR codes on posters and signage, prize incentives and City of Cockburn staff encouraging attendees to complete the survey during the events).
City of Cockburn Events and Culture Manager, Marie La Frenais, shares the tactics: “The City used a variety of platforms to engage with our community in order to collect as many survey responses as possible. This included face to face interactions at events using staff that are trained in excellence in customer service. By using QR codes on various promotional materials and promoting post event surveying the City has been successful in gathering responses.”
In implementing the data collection strategy themselves, the City of Cockburn gained some valuable key learnings, as Marie La Frenais highlights:
“Appropriately resourcing on site surveying to gather as much participant feedback as possible. Having trained customer service staff meant interactions with patrons were successful.”
Working with the data collected by the City of Cockburn, Culture Counts created three customised Online Insight Reports that demonstrated the key strategic achievements of each event across social, economic, qualities, place and community outcome areas and provided comparative and additional qualitative data by which to measure the successes of the 2023-24 event season’s programs.
Outcome
The City was incredibly successful in collecting survey responses for the 2023-24 season, with over 900 survey responses were collected from public attendees across the three events, Beeliar Sun Sets (251 responses), Coogee Beach Festival (245 responses) and Coogee Live (427 responses).
Key achievements included:
- The vast majority of Coogee Live 2024 attendees had a positive overall experience at the event (95%), an excellent result.
- The Economic, Community and Social domains for Coogee Live 2024 each achieved an overall agreement score of 89%.
- 95% of respondents agreed that the Coogee Beach Festival 2024 made them feel proud of their local area (Place).
- 94% of respondents agreed that they enjoyed the vibrancy and activity that Coogee Beach Festival 2024 provided (Vibrancy).
- 100% of respondents agreed with the Enthusiasm dimension that they would come to an event like Beeliar Sun Sets 2023-2024 again.
- 98% of respondents felt safe and welcome at Beeliar Sun Sets 2023-2024 (Safe).
Marie La Frenais shares how evaluating their activities using Culture Counts has helped them communicate their value:
“Communicating our value to our internal and external stakeholders has been amplified by using Culture Counts. It allows us to benchmark ourselves and champion certain events moving forward. It also provides value to our partners and sponsors that support our major events.”
Are you interested in engaging Culture Counts to evaluate your event? Contact us here to receive our Product Guide or to book an appointment with the friendly Client Team.
