• Held on-site at an American Space or organized by an American Space at an off-site location.
• Do not have a virtual interactive component (meaning there is not interaction with online participants).
• Program speakers can be virtual, the audience must be in-person.

How to count an In-Person participant:

• In-person program participants are the number of people that attend the program at the American Space or at the off-site location by physically entering the program location.  For a series that has the same audience across a number of activities, count each session as a program and the audience as individual in-person program participants.

Examples of In-Person Programs:

• • The American Corner screens the documentary Women in Space and holds a discussion group with 58 participants.

• A Washington-based office of ECA offers a program that is live-streamed over Facebook, with opportunities for questions from the field. The American Center hosts a viewing party with 50 participants in the Space. For the American Center, this is counted as an in-person program, not a hybrid nor a virtual program, and the Space would report 50 in-person participants and one in-person program. This is because the American Center did not set up or share the livestream.
  

  Number of In-Person Participants	Number of In-Person Programs
  50	1

• Must be hosted by the American Space via an online platform.
• Does not have an in-person audience.
• Must include engagement online during the live program moderated by the American Space, usually through social media (such as FB Live), web chat platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat, or video conferencing platforms such as Zoom.
  ○ Videos posted to social media (with no interactive component from the American Space during the live program) do not count as virtual programs, but instead as social media engagement.

How to count a Virtual Participant:

As virtual programs are meant to be interactive, a participant must attend a virtual event live.  For video conferencing, use the number of participants during the session.  For live stream videos, use the number of views at the conclusion of the event.  Posts or Spaces using a text-based app for programmatic efforts are requested to reach out to the Office of American Spaces for detailed guidance on measurement.

Examples of Virtual Programs:

• The American Center runs a leadership class for 150 virtual students via Google Classroom

The American Corner hosts a Facebook Live session on women’s empowerment with 200 online participants.  At the end of the month, the Corner rechecks the views and finds that a total of 250 people viewed the program.  However, the additional views came after the live, interactive event.

• Must be hosted by the American Space.
• Has an in-person audience at the American Space or at an off-site location.
• Must also include a virtual element, meaning that an online audience outside the in-person audience engages with the live program, usually through social media, messaging apps, or video conferencing platforms.

How to count a Hybrid Participant:

Use the same methods described above to count the in-person participants.  Separately, use the same methods described above to count the virtual participants, then add these two numbers together, to calculate the total number of participants in the Hybrid program.

Examples of Hybrid programs:

• • The American Center streams a panel discussion on-site in front of a live audience of 45 participants. The stream receives 350 live views.

• • The American Corner hosts a speaker event at a nearby auditorium with 100 in-person program participants. It is also broadcast via Facebook Live with 450 views.

• Visitors are those people who enter the American Space in order to use resources that are funded by the U.S. government or provided in support of U.S. government policy objectives, including library and resource collections.
• Visitors should be counted once on a given day.  If a visitor enters and departs the American Space four times on one day, they should only count as one visitor.

There are a number of ways to get reasonably good data about visits to your Space. The choice of method should be decided through consultation between posts and Spaces, taking into account local conditions of physical layout, privacy laws, security expectations, and available funding. REPS can provide significant operational expertise to assist with these decisions. Options for counting visits include the following methods, with examples to follow:

• Foot counters: Foot counters can be expensive, and some models are more reliable than others. Because foot counters are an imprecise and often unreliable way to count visitors, they are recommended only for spaces with extremely heavy foot traffic.
• Head counts: Count the number of people using the Space at set times during the day. The Space may calculate a daily total based on a limited snapshot, as long as the method of calculation has been reviewed by post and the REPS and they consider it reasonable. Best practice shows that if head counts are used to report the visits metric, then they should be conducted at least once per day.
• Log books or spreadsheets: As long as the Space has little or no privacy or security concerns, then Spaces staff may ask visitors to sign in as they enter the Space, counting the number of sign-ins at the end of the day.
• Online check-in system: As long as your Space has no privacy or security concerns, then Spaces staff can ask visitors to check in with a computer- or tablet-based sign-in system as they enter the Space.
• Paper ticket dispenser: A paper ticket dispenser can be used to track visits by noting the starting ticket number at the start of the Space’s operating hours and the ending ticket number at the closing time.

Examples of Reporting Visits

• The American Center’s foot counter counted a total of 293 visits last month, including the in-person participants.  The American Center knows by some other means that 110 people participated in in-person programs that month. 
  
  

  Number of In-Person Program Participants	Number of Visits COUNTED	Number of Visits REPORTED
  110	293	293 – 110 = 183

• The American Corner takes daily head counts at 2 PM, their peak visiting hour and a time when the Corner usually does not conduct programs. From experience, the Corner knows that a small number of people usually visit at other times of the day. By agreement with post and the REPS, the Corner adds up the number of daily head counts for the month, then increases that by 5% to account for people who visit at some other time of day. Last month, the Corner’s head counts totaled 200 visits. The Corner also offers programs, usually at some other time of the day, and does not count these participants when they do their head counts. Last month, the Corner held five (5) in-person programs with a total of 100 in-person participants.
  

  Number of In-Person Program Participants	Number of Visits COUNTED	Number of Visits REPORTED
  100	200	200 + 200*0.05 = 210

• The American Corner uses a deli-counter style paper ticket dispenser and asks each visitor to take one ticket, only once, on any given day. The Corner notes the ticket number at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, and calculates the difference to know how many visits they had. This Corner asks in-person participants to take a ticket too, because it would be difficult to give different instructions to different people. Last month they conducted 14 in-person programs with a total of 280 in-person participants (counted through some other means, such as a registration check-in form), and three (3) virtual programs with a total of 500 virtual participants. At the end of the month, the Corner adds up all the daily visits numbers based on the ticket dispensers, and found 340 visits, total.
  

  Number of In-Person Program Participants	Number of Visits COUNTED	Number of Visits REPORTED
  280	340	340 – 280 = 60

Beginning with October 2023 statistics, Binational Centers should on a monthly basis report the number of programs, program attendees, and visitors, as defined below.

What to Count as American Spaces Programs

• Programs are activities funded by the U.S. government or carried out in support of U.S. government policy objectives that are organized by the Binational Center, open to target audiences at no cost, and are branded as American Spaces programs.
• Programs may be in-person, virtual, or hybrid.
• If the same program is done three times for three different audiences, that counts as three separate programs.
• Activities offered by Binational Centers that do not support the American Spaces Six Pillars or that require tuition or entry fees should not be counted as programs in your reporting.  This includes fee-based English language courses taught at Binational Centers.

Program Attendees

• Program attendees are the number of people that attend a program as defined above. Attendance may be in-person or virtual.  Audiences attending programs that require tuition or entry fees should not be reported as program attendees.
• Scholarship recipients, including for USG-funded scholarships, do not count as program attendees.  This is because the programs they received the scholarship for are tuition-based, and our focus is on programs that are funded by or carried out in support of U.S. government policies free of charge.

Visits

• Visitors are only those people who enter the BNC in order to use resources that are funded by the U.S. government or provided in support of U.S. government policy objectives, including library and resource collections.  Therefore, not everyone who walks through the doors of the BNC headquarters or branches should be counted as a visitor for American Spaces purposes. BNCs should use a counting system, or reasonable estimates of visits to areas that are open to the general public at no cost and that have a connection to American Space programs or resources.
• Visitors should not be counted more than once on a given day.  If a visitor enters and departs the BNC four times on one day, they should only count as one visitor.
• If students receive a USG-funded scholarship to a tuition-based programs they may be counted as visitors due to the link to U.S. government funding, but as outlined above, they should not be counted as program attendees.

At this time, the Office of American Spaces is not requiring Spaces to report engagement statistics for static social media posts and non-live events. Please keep in mind that social media posts may involve interaction with social media audiences (followers, reactions, etc.), but they are different from virtual programs in that there is no initial live event featuring Space-moderated interaction with a virtual audience.