10 Proven Ways to Boost Attendee Survey Response Rate: Your Ultimate Guide to Event Feedback Success.
When organizing an event, how to measure its success? To get quality event feedback about guests’ experience, it’s essential to ask them directly how it was.
Getting event feedback from as many participants as possible is not an easy task. But, once you master it, it can be replicated for every single meeting you organize. At the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to start applying it beginning with your next event.
Why event feedback increases your subsequent project level significantly.
Businesses of all sizes host thousands of events each year: from small meetings to incentive trips and large sales conventions. And 67% of Event Marketers measure their ROI based on attendee satisfaction. Decisions regarding investments and, consequently, the adoption of new strategies pass through the filter of one or more managers who may be representing different areas.
To make the long story short: “Getting feedback is essential because that’s the only way you’ll make your events better”. That’s how Will Curran, Founder of Endless Events, summarizes the whole problem.
How to collect event feedback.
We saw that the success of an event is measured by the satisfaction of its participants. And the most effective way to gain information about it is by asking the public. In this post, you’ll learn methods that have proven to increase attendee feedback by more than 60%. See how to apply techniques, tips, and it’s best practices:
1. Start a conversation by asking guests to complete phrases.
- Event survey questions must not be sales-related questions.
- Ask about their plans and what’s their main objective for the conference.
- Ask about their work.
- Comment something about the venue.
- Ask for help for the next congress days.
- Keep open-ended-questions short.
- The three answer choices rule.
2. Encourage them to do it right now.
An app made for your event can serve as a continuous communication channel between your company and your audience. It stores cookies on the user’s mobile phones, mapping out the whole attendee journey.
In addition to prompting people about how their experiences are going, you can continue to submit relevant news and information about attending speakers and sponsors, program updates, etc.
Anyway, continuing to encourage the audience to stay active in the app is a way to bond with your audience.
So don’t wait for your next event! Here are just a few ways you can capture real-time feedback during the event:
- Polls
- Quizzes
- Live feed interactions
- Sharing files
3. Make guests feel important by highlighting the numbers of the community they are participating.
If you go to sports stadiums and courts, you have noticed that the organization always releases the number of attendees and income of every match. Provide benchmark data on your post-event survey . For example, we are a 5.000 people community, but your presence was unique. Sharing attendee counts, amounts, and important stats helps people to perceive the importance of the occasion.
Make sure your event surveys work great on mobile devices. Probably your attendees will pop your survey open in transit. Also, distribute a short, well-designed, mobile-friendly survey.
4. Ask them right after the event, too, before they have something more important to talk about.
Limit response options to 4-6 maximum. Above all, remember the goal is to make them as easy to possible to respond to. So you don’t want: a) respondents having to spend too much reading through the options; and b) respondents deciding it looks too overwhelming to bother with.
5. Ask clearly.
- In a word, how was your overall experience?
- How did you relate to the presented learning paths?
- Do you approve of the speakers and their lectures?
- How easy was your navigation through all event areas?
- Was there something you didn’t like?
- How efficient were your accreditation and check-in?
- What was the best thing about the event?
- Are you willing to come over to our next event?
- Would you recommend it to your friends?
6. Apply best practices, like NPS.
NPS is a result-driven methodology you should not live without. We have a guide for you to start applying NPS to your event feedback form today. As a brief statement of the idea, data collection can be done from satisfaction surveys that are sent to users. Then, people will answer event survey questions in real time and without external influences or intermediary actions. Most noteworthy, an app allows a larger number of responses as all users will be able to receive the event feedback survey.
In addition, it is possible to measure the level of audience satisfaction through the interaction between participants, which is a very valuable and very real form of feedback.
7. Make sure to have a great mobile format survey.
Every opinion that you collect after the event is not a reaction anymore. Our memories have strong filters and are highly influenced by external factors as well.
And you’ve invested months of planning on an awesome experience. So make sure you can capture the audience’s reaction and feedback straight away when they’re still merged in the magic.
8. Exhibit partial results in real-time.
And preferably on big screens and public panels. Therefore, people are gonna get curious and encouraged to participate.
9. Use an Event App for all of the above.
With data collected during the event, you can measure results and have more accurate information that shows whether the event was a success and at what points you can invest to further enhance participants’ experience. With an event app, this data collection is much more complete and understandable, making your feedback even better.
Adopting an app for your future events can be one of the best tips in this article. It’s a way to ensure that event attendees are effectively receiving what you communicate, with no noise or inaccuracies in range. More than that, the eventual integration of the application with social media can also be used to enhance your message, encouraging the user to make use of sharing resources and the like.
10. Show excitement for the continuation of the relationship.
Collecting feedback from invitees after an event that is not in the first edition can help you accomplish a number of goals. Therefore, a post-event survey or event feedback form work best when you use them to:
- Thank them for their presence;
- Involve invitees with the brand, nurturing them with rich and valuable content;
- Build excitement for the next occasions;
Keep learning. Don’t forget to check our event marketing resources to excel in your career:
- 7 ideas to market your event for free
- MICE Tourism: what is it and what these travelers look for
- NPS for events: why it’s crucial and how to apply
- How to choose a keynote speaker to your event
- 7 essential competencies for the full-stack Event Manager
- Event planning schedule for any type of conference
About the Author / InEvent
