Impacts of Cultural Events in Eastern Finland – Development of a Finnish Event Evaluation Tool

Abstract In recent years, events and festivals have been increasingly seen as a good way of developing the regions and the tourism in localities in eastern Finland. In order to be able to produce comparable information on the different impacts of events in Finland, and to gain continuity to event research, a pilot version of a Finnish Event Evaluation Tool (FEET) was created in 2007. The article presents the development of FEET which was piloted in 12 events. The tool is based on former impacts research. It concentrates on evaluating socio‐cultural impacts of events in parallel with economic impacts. Innovative in FEET is the possibility of collecting comparable information from several stakeholder groups at the same time.