Feedback is essential to successful events

From a large trade exhibition or global conference, to a smaller training course or award ceremony, whatever event you are running, the ability to gather and measure the views of your audiences will help you to plan, organise and host even more successful events in the future.

Given the wide range of audiences you could be interacting with at different stages of your event, which could include delegates and speakers to exhibitors and sponsors, it’s important to be able to gather feedback before, during and following events.

You may have a good gut feel for knowing roughly how well your past events have performed, but human experiences vary, which makes it challenging for even the most experienced event planner to accurately assess their event success and use this as a basis to inform their future decisions.

In contrast, the right event survey and questionnaire can enable you to remove the guesswork from your evaluation process, helping you to gain a more accurate insight into what your event audiences are thinking and improve your event planning going forward.

Four key benefits of running event surveys

1. Better understand your audiences

   With more information about their likes and dislikes, their expectations of your products and services, and what would make them most likely to attend or support one of your future events.

2. Identify areas where you need to improve

   With feedback and suggestions from respondents about what they felt could have worked better and ideas about what you might like to include next time around.

3. Make your event even more relevant in the future

   From sponsors and exhibitors, to speakers and delegates, given that your event is likely to have many different interested audiences, by surveying all these groups you’re more likely to get a broader perspective of how well your event is meeting your industry’s needs. Trends and issues change, so the more audiences you survey the more likely to be able to keep abreast of this and shape your marketing strategy to become even more relevant in the future.

4. Attract more sponsors and increase your success

   By running more surveys and using your positive post-event survey results to demonstrate your event’s success story, which helps to draw in more sponsorship and funding.

1. Keep it short

   Generally, the longer your survey the less people will complete it. So, aim for no more than 5 – 15 questions in length.

2. Offer an incentive

   Depending on the type and size of event you are running you may want to include an incentive with your survey to encourage more participants to respond. Whether its cash, a gift or entry into a prize draw, whatever your incentive, putting a time limit on how long it’s available for can elicit a faster response from your audience.

3. Send reminders, but not too many

   Many respondents will be too busy, or just unavailable when your original survey invitation is sent, so sending reminders to persuade them to complete your survey at a time that is more convenient for them can be very effective at increasing your response rate. However, it’s important to not overdo this.

1. Choose the most appropriate survey distribution method

   The great thing about online event surveys is that they can be distributed in a myriad of ways, from an email invitation, website pop up or an SMS to distribution via a QR code, a social media channel and even an offline survey if you are in an area where there is no Internet connection. So, whatever stage your event is at, or the demographics of your event audience, there will be an effective option available to distribute your survey.

2. Reassure respondents of their data privacy

   Data protection and data security are more critical than ever before. So, if you can reassure participants that you have the right procedures in place to protect and secure their data, they will be more likely to respond to your survey.

3. Timely distribution

   Whether looking to send a pre-event or post-event survey, or even get your audiences to complete a survey during your event, sending it as soon as they sign up for your event or when it ends is more likely to capture their attention when everything is fresh in their minds.

Why use online event surveys rather than paper-based versions

Given the wide range of events that an event planner may need to organise, their size can sometimes determine whether they choose to use a paper-based or online survey to collect feedback.

For a small training course, a paper-based survey can seem like a quick and effective way to collect post-event views from your participants. However, with written questionnaire responses often difficult to read and the ever-present risk that bits of paper can go missing, which can affect your results, going digital is ultimately a more reliable and effective option.

In contrast to paper-based surveys, online event surveys offer many advantages:

• Cost savings

  With digital data collection there are no paper, postage, printing and data input costs to worry about. It’s quick to set up and create a free online survey and then simply upgrade your account to a paid plan when you need more advanced features.

• It’s easier to reach respondents anywhere

  As you can make your survey simpler to access on any device via email, social media, an embedded link on a website and even SMS.

• Simpler evaluation and analysis

  As you can view real-time results and easily perform in-depth analysis on the data you collect through customised reports.

• More professional look and feel

  Through design tools that allow you to customise everything from your logo, fonts, colours and background images. You can even add domain branding to ensure everything is on-brand, which helps to build trust with respondents and can increase your response rates.

• Improved data security

  Following the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act in May 2018, the steps that organisations need to take to secure their data became even stricter. No matter how small or informal your event, confidentiality and data protection are critical, particularly when collecting personally identifiable information.

  Compared with information on paper-based surveys, which can easily go missing, survey information held online is easier to secure, particularly when you are working with an ISO27001 certified company like SmartSurvey, which in order to retain its accreditation status needs to have some of the most robust industry processes and infrastructures in place to secure customers’ data including hosting in a secure, UK based data centre.

• Better plan future events

  With the scheduling tools available with online survey software you can even boost the attendance at your future events. Rather than the traditional way of chasing people and trying to juggle suitable dates, times and venues, through an online scheduling survey you can quickly ascertain peoples’ availability and preferences for your event, which can ultimately help maximise its overall chances of success.