Events have the power to bring a community closer together and inspire people. Analytics and data give us insights into what our customers want from our business. But if you’re not collecting feedback from people who attend community events, even your best efforts might not be resonating with your audience.
Gathering attendee feedback is the best way to understand your target audience and thus improve the reach and relevance of your events.
1. Surveys:
Surveys are the bread and butter for getting feedback. They’re simple to set up, easy to send out, clear to analyse and scale-up.
There are two basic ways to approach surveys.
A) Long Surveys
We are familiar with this one, right?
Just send out the survey link to your customer list, social media followers, and anyone that falls in your pre-defined TG group; then, give it a few days, and check back. You will surely have received feedback from which you can glean pertinent insights. One thing to bear in mind is that you must ask only those questions that serve a specific purpose; this will ensure you get better quality responses.
B) Short Surveys
The other alternative is to offer a survey right on your site.
Feature a survey on your website; limit it to one or two questions that are highly relevant.
2. Ask Open-ended Questions:
Open-ended questions ask respondents to answer on their own terms. Although these questions can benefit you gain deep insight into your attendees’ thoughts and responses, the effort required to answer them is more significant than a multiple choice question.
Having said that, these questions are harder to interpret, as answers can’t be easily turned into charts or graphs.
3. Multiple Choice Questions
Multiple choice questions have a defined set of answers and allow respondents to choose multiple responses or just one answer. With a limited choice of answers, respondents can provide feedback more easily which will eventually increase the number of people who complete the survey. Tip: always include a “none apply” option so that respondents don’t get stuck with no options.
4.Reach Out Directly:
This is the best option of all and probably the most undervalued. If you want to really understand somebody, you really need to go talk to them.
When you are using surveys, email, or analytics, you are missing out on all sorts of contextual information.
If you don’t reach out and talk to your consumer and clients, you’ll never learn what’s really going on, and you’ll be trying to fix the symptom instead of the actual problem.
A 1-hour lunch will get you genuine feedback than a hundred customer surveys.
When you collect right feedback from your customers consistently, you’ll know if you’re event curation and conceptualisation is heading in the right direction. So, before you sit to draw out the blueprint of your next experiential extravaganza, take time out and conduct an apt survey.