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2-8-2023
Big Picture Report: February 2023
Bernadette Wiltz-Lang, SUSTA
Your Input Matters
With the 2023 program year starting off, I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone how important our activity surveys are. I know that during the past couple of years with various challenges in the export market – and to your businesses at home – there has been a bit of a survey fatigue. But the information we receive from these evaluations is critically important.
Allow me to go over the process. For Global Events, at the end of each activity you’re asked to fill out an evaluation survey that has some basic information which helps us evaluate the activity. We ask questions like, how many new products you introduced, what category do they fall in, and how did SUSTA and our State Departments of Agriculture do in planning and managing the activity.
We also want to know how many contacts you made and how many you consider to be quality contacts, and your rating of the activity overall. These are benchmarks of the quality of the event that helps us determine if it is a good fit for our participants and SUSTA’s overall strategy.
We also ask you if you made any sales at the event. That, of course, is another important benchmark. Then, what you project your sales to be from participating in that activity, which is helpful to measure against the second, follow-up survey which comes in six months, for you to share more about sales made as a result of participating with SUSTA activity. These follow up surveys are crucial to determining the return on investment of our program budget.
For those of you who participated in Global Events activities in the second half of 2022, please be sure to complete our six month follow up survey when it comes. These surveys are where SUSTA gets the final sales volumes to report back to USDA. If you participated in an activity in the first half of 2022 and haven’t yet completed the follow-up, please do so.
For those of you in the 50% CostShare program, there is one year-end survey. Those have gone out and, again, we ask you to please complete them.
In addition to specific questions, each survey provides an opportunity for comments and suggestions. Be assured that we pore through your comments, beyond the just the bottom-line numbers. Your feedback gives us important insights into how to be more effective in supporting your future efforts.
So, just to wrap up, a few initial surveys are in from January, and so far, the year is starting strong! In the coming weeks and months, we ask for your help to measure success from 2022 and throughout 2023 by completing and submitting these questionnaires. As the saying goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure” and SUSTA is here for the sole purpose of helping improve your export marketing!
You can find all surveys that are assigned to you in your MySUSTA account.
