5 tips for evaluating your seminar feedback

Why should I evaluate the seminar feedback?

The seminar feedback you receive is pure gold in your hands.

It would be fatal to let it lie unused. After all, you made the effort to collect it from your seminar participants. There is so much potential in the answers you receive.

Evaluate them according to your individual goals, interpret the results and draw the right conclusions. Implement the measures based on these results in the right way to ensure the long-term success of your seminar.

Your efforts to continuously adapt your seminar to the wishes and expectations of your seminar visitors will pay off in the form of a positive recommendation rate and an increased number of seminar bookings.

When should I evaluate the feedback I receive?

In general, you should not take too much time with the evaluation. The sooner, the better. Because then you can steer your seminar more quickly on the right track with the participant feedback you receive.

Imagine you offer a series of seminars over several weeks. After the first two events, you receive only moderate feedback from your seminar participants with some suggestions for improvement. In addition, according to some survey results, you were not able to meet the expectations of some participants.

Instead of being frustrated or even disappointed, you should capitalize on these lessons learned and successfully adapt the rest of the courses in your seminar series.

Surprise your seminar participants by responding to feedback and giving them what they want and expect from the seminar.

How do I start my seminar evaluation?

First of all, be aware of the goal you want to achieve with the seminar survey. This will make it easier for you to evaluate the answers and then interpret them.

Even if you get unexpected answers to certain questions, your set goal will remind you how best to deal with those answers.

If you are aware of the goal of the survey, the next step is to take a look at the participation rate. This tells you in advance whether your seminar survey has problems and needs to be optimized.

Let’s assume you distribute your seminar questionnaire to the participants a few days after the event and the response rate is low at the end of the survey period.

This circumstance already provides you with the first insight that something is not right. First, get an overview and think about where there might be problems.

If, for example, many of the participants only answered the first few pages of the survey, this could be due to the following reasons:

1. Maybe the question is too complicated/complex and demands too much from the participants.
2. Most of your questions are marked as mandatory, but the participants do not want to or cannot answer all of them.
3. You have placed too many open text questions and the participants should give a lot of input for each question.

Check these points and get an external opinion on the questionnaire if necessary. However, if everything is simple and understandable here, check whether the timing may be wrong.

If many participants have taken part in your seminar survey, you can evaluate the results directly in the next step with the help of filters, tables and diagrams.

First get an overview by visualizing the survey results, and then put the questions in relation to each other in order to recognize correlations and hidden messages from your survey participants.

If you use open-ended questions in your survey, it is advisable to display the freely formulated answers and comments in a word cloud.

The word cloud allows you to visualize the most frequently mentioned terms at a glance and display their frequency distribution.

After you have prepared your survey data, the next step is to interpret the results. The goal of the interpretation is to draw the right conclusions from the analysis in order to optimize your event in a sustainable and success-oriented manner. Prepare your collected data in a targeted manner and draw the right conclusions afterwards.

How should I evaluate the results of the seminar survey?

When evaluating and interpreting the feedback, don’t just focus on the numbers. When interpreting the feedback, also put yourself in the role of the person giving the feedback.

His assessment is always subjective and could have been influenced by various internal as well as external factors when answering the questions.

For example, due to the timing of the survey, the way the survey was conducted, the length of the questionnaire, or even other reasons within the context of the event.

All these factors can have a negative impact on the motivation and diligence of the seminar evaluator.

If you put yourself in the perspective of the respective feedback provider when interpreting, especially negative evaluations, these evaluations will receive a different weighting for you and still gain valuable insights.

What are the next steps after evaluating the seminar survey?

After evaluating and interpreting the results obtained, you should above all follow up with action.

Adapt your seminar course according to the wishes, interests and expectations of the customers (seminar participants) and continue to use seminar evaluations to evaluate and improve the course.

What we would suggest: Keep optimizing constantly!

If you have received good evaluations of your course from seminar participants, you can use them for your marketing strategy.

Publish individual comments or evaluation points on your website, in social media or in print media. This has a sales-promoting effect on your seminar and increases the recommendation rate.