We measure the success on random courses in two ways.
Measure 1: We do a simple count of how many take the flight. This only gives us one measure, as it doesn’t show how many of those would have flown anyway regardless of our course – which is why measure 2 is even more important.
Measure 2: On random courses, we ask people to rate at the beginning and end of the day how they feel about flying on a scale of 1-10. On the random course we have chosen to evaluate, this is asked of all the people that attend regardless of whether they have flown before, currently fly or have never flown. (Out of interest, the general percentage for most courses is roughly: 10% never flown; 40% have flown at some point (even regularly) but have now stopped for various reasons; Lastly, about 50% still fly and their fear is to varying degrees.) We then use that difference to give us a measure of the how the course has improved their feelings towards flying. Some people make significant movement, others, it is more incremental but there is always improvement provided the delegates give themselves permission not to be perfect straight away! The last course that we measured, the success rate was 98.6%.
We also get lots of postcards every week from graduates of our course and also feedback is regularly left on our ‘Message Board’.