How can you make your event feedback useful?

One thing I found helpful to use the feedback is; Share key feedback insights with your team and discuss actionable steps for improvement. Communicate with attendees about how their feedback is being used to shape future events. Implement changes based on feedback and track their impact on future events. Additional Tips: Start early: Collect feedback throughout the event, not just afterwards. Incentivize participation: Offer a discount or entry into a drawing for completing feedback. Be transparent: Acknowledge that feedback is valued and will be used constructively. Show appreciation: Thank attendees for their time and input. Be responsive: Address negative feedback directly and explain how you'll improve.

The best tool you have in your arsenal is the ability to have a candid conversation. Keep recording booths, and employ tech like Slido or Mentimeter to engage audiences but also, go out and talk.

What a great post and question Amy. Being in the events business at FISA, we do post event surveys for both our supplier partners and guest buyers. We read every survey and consider the really good suggestions. You are spot on here

1. Choose the right tools: Utilize AI-powered platforms or tools that can efficiently gather and analyze feedback from attendees. These tools can range from simple survey platforms to more advanced sentiment analysis tools. 2. Ask the right questions: Craft questions that are specific, relevant, and actionable. Avoid generic questions and focus on aspects that will provide valuable insights for improving future events. For example, ask about the relevance of the topics discussed, the quality of speakers, the effectiveness of networking opportunities, and overall satisfaction.

- The first and often overlooked part of utilising event feedback is being open to listening to it - You need to have a pre-arranged way of collecting the feedback, whether that is live testimonials at the event, a post-event survey sent out via an email or old school 'feed back sheets'. - Have an internal meeting after the event and see what can be reasonably implemented going forward. Assign who is responsible to each part of this and ensure you are tracking this regularly. - SHARE what you have implemented with the people who asked you to make the change, make sure they know that you value their input and that you have listened!

The questions you ask will matter the most, quality feedback is only received if you are asking the right questions. Make sure the answers that you receive are qualitative and quantitative.

When soliciting feedback on your event, be clear on first on what are measures for success then build your questions around obtaining feedback that improves the event experience and outcomes defined by your measures.

Events require a process of continuous improvement: from one edition to the next, our participants expect significant changes in format and organisational creativity. During the lifecycle of organising an event from A to Z, we need to take note of feedback from the marketing, sales, logistics, finance and HR teams, and record the pain points. By analysing them, we can measure their impact on the final quality perceived by participants. These potential impacts should be discussed on site with the participants and in the satisfaction questionnaire. In this way, the debrief of the event will start with the outline of an objective roadmap that will generate ideas and collective inventions for the next edition.

Be open to hearing the hard truths. Frame questions in a manner that creates a sense of belonging for your participants. Don’t be complicated, keep it simple. Be intentional about making the experience better upon receiving the results.

Ask the hard questions. How have we failed? What can we do to do better? What do you find most memorable? I find keeping questions short but open is helpful in getting participants to open up.

Feedback is most beneficial when shared with the team and used to develop actionable improvements. Maintain open communication with participants regarding how their ideas are shaping future events.

Create questions for various folks, general audience, speakers, key stakeholders, clients. Each feedback received can help you shape your experience and intent better.

Usually, I build a story tailing in my feedback and say/explain how I would act here or how it could be better according to my expertise.

After obtaining valuable answers to targeted questions, the process shouldn't conclude there. It's essential to delve deeper, extracting sentiments across various criteria and meticulously categorizing them. Organized data enables teams to derive substantial benefits, surpassing mere information collection for more impactful use.

Determine if you want to analyse the feedback based on different stakeholders' perspectives. For example, at a career fair, you would want the feedback of the staff helping, the employers attending, and the students attending. You can ask them all the same questions and make sure to have a question asking them to identify as a student, employer or staff, and segment your final data that way to understand different perspectives. This gives you a view of how different groups found the same event, and insight into different perspectives and how to make changes based on these different groups. Be careful not to get too in the weeds with this as it can begin making things more complicated. Try to keep as high-level your segments as possible.

Very important though it won't sound important but many people wait for the result as it also feels valued as they gave time for the feedback

While engaging audience use tools like Sli.do or Mentimeter to show realtime feedback as a graph, or visual aid. This will enable audiences to partake in more such initiatives.

If I have enough time even to visualize my feedback, it usually happens rarely as people expect to have it immediately - I use FigJam, a very excellent tool. But my recommendation: Don't waste tiple, think and give immediately, and only if that is required to prepare - do your best.

Visualising your feedback can take time but, if it's necessary to get people to understand, do it. It helps a lot to see things as a whole (pie chart) instead of just numbers in a table. Pie charts really help put parameters on the group in question to think of everyone attending and the responses as a whole instead of considering outside factors. Tables are great for quick information, but further effort should be put into this presentation, at least to save for final reports in the future. PowerPoint and Excel are great resources for this that automatically create the visuals when you input the data. Canva can help things look pretty but you have to manually input the data and create the visuals yourself.

It always makes sense to prepare and visualise the feedback. Not only so that you can visualise it more clearly yourself, but above all for others. When I think of public administration, it is extremely important that a visualisation is created for decision-makers in the municipality and in politics. It provides me with a basis for argumentation. You can first use Excel for this and then use more creative tools to visualise it in such a way that even people from outside the industry can understand it.

An example I've seen is a discount as a thank you for participating in feedback. Also a personalized thank you and reference to my feedback shows they listened

We have all been there…you get a survey and you think to yourself why should I even complete this. You have taken the time to create the survey for the feedback so use the results you have received good, bad or indifferent. In addition, take the time to say to attendees we heard you and we are making it happen. Not only does it show your commitment to the attendee, but it will also help to build your community and for the next survey encourage higher response rate.

A community-based approach to collecting comments results in a much higher response rate. To do this, use the word "we" or "us" and include the respondent in the community of organisers/participants. Alongside the testimonial question, ask the person to upload their photo and explain that a white paper on the subject of the event and the participating community will be published and sent to everyone. Their contribution will be published. The same applies to technical contributions. If improvements or innovations are proposed for the next edition, please quote those who mentioned them in the last edition in the questionnaire. The event you are organising is a kind of common good shared with many people: all the participants.

Realistically you need to consider the feedback - before you initiate the survey. Otherwise you run the risk of responses and summaries that are not aligned with your wider goals. With annual events - it is then crucial to reshare the feedback with your audience to verbalise what actions you are taking differently this year, following their responses last year..

Make sure you act on the feedback you receive from audiences, the chances of particular audience being at your events time and again are high. Feedback received and acted on will show greatly enhance their experience.

Feedback is the most powerful tool in any interaction. Imagine a smartphone that does nothing while you click the button - what is happening there? Nothing? Or just no feedback? Provide feedback whenever you think it could help. Don't hurt through the feedback; it won't solve and will make it worse. Like a hummer, you could hit your finger (or someone else) or help to drive a nail.

Sharing feedback is not only about closing the loop on the event experience but also about fostering stronger connections - this builds trust with both your internal and external stakeholders. It reassures them that their opinions and experiences are valued and taken seriously. A great opportunity to also showcase successes and drive ongoing collaboration and improvement.

Sharing feedback helps others to realize that this could be beneficial and continue to delve into the information that an article offers!

Constructive feedback can be so powerful to a number of stakeholders. Dedicate the time to debrief with your team and your clients, discuss the feedback in a strategic way, and get the team brainstorming on how to build a more positive event experience. If you are sharing the feedback with your client (provided you work for an events agency), advise them how to use it to their advantage when building rapport with their prospects. And remember to shout about the positive feedback! Everyone loves a success story. It increased your and your brand's credibility in the industry.

Feedback is useless if you don't have buy in from the CEO. Communications are good but it's important to have executive stamp of approval so you can do the event again.

Remember that you are a human being in relationship with other human beings. You are entangled with the people who attend the event you are hosting in a complicated intersubjective dance. When collecting and using data to manipulate user experience you are always at risk of dehumanizing your guests and yourself by treating people like objects to be controlled. Keep your heart open and let life happen.

Making event feedback useful is not just about collecting opinions; it's about transforming them into a blueprint for ongoing success.

To make your event feedback actually helpful, get straight to the point and be specific about what rocked and what didn't. Suggest real fixes, not just complaints. Did something work well? Say why. Something fell flat? Offer an idea to make it better. Mix in the good with the bad to keep things balanced. Be kind but honest, and don't wait forever to send it in. Remember, the folks reading it probably poured their hearts into the event, so a little empathy goes a long way.

In my world (Treasury, AP, AR, Finance, FP&A) content is king. So eliciting and getting feedback on the content, speakers, and format of event sessions is critical. That means having session evaluations for each educational session and using it to guide content and content delivery at your next event.

Continuous Feedback Loops: Establish mechanisms for ongoing feedback collection and evaluation throughout the event. Embrace real-time feedback channels and iterative improvement cycles to adapt and refine event experiences in real-time. Feedback Integration: Incorporate feedback mechanisms into event registration, session evaluations, and post-event surveys to gather comprehensive insights across all touchpoints. Benchmarking and Comparison: Benchmark event feedback against best practices, and past performance metrics to gauge progress and identify areas of excellence or improvement. Analyze feedback trends over time to track changes in attendee satisfaction levels and measure the effectiveness of implemented enhancements.