Get seminar and event feedback

Insights from Dennis – 04/21

When is the best time to gather feedback after an event or seminar?

You prepared for a long time; you immersed yourself in the subject matter, recorded important learning objectives for your participants, put together a great event program and took care of the visitors’ physical well-being. In your opinion, everything went very well.

After the event, you go your separate ways and valuable information is lost along with the people. This means that you miss the opportunity to recognize the need for optimization in order to improve the quality of your seminar or event in the long term and in line with expectations.

Therefore: Getting feedback makes sense! But when is the best time to get feedback after a seminar or event? Today’s “Insights from Dennis” is about exactly this topic. Be curious about insider knowledge from the feedback expert.

Getting feedback after a seminar or event makes sense for many reasons. On the one hand, you get first-hand personal impressions of your participants, on the other hand, it gives you the opportunity to learn about the expectations and needs of your participants and to adjust your event processes and content according to needs and target groups.

There are basically two ways in which you can gather feedback:

1. Get feedback after the event

In the first variant, feedback is collected after the event – this is the classic and most well-known way. However, this is often where the problem lies:

The participants have already returned to their everyday lives and jobs in the meantime. By the time the email arrives, they have already closed their minds to the event and are often no longer willing to provide feedback. The email is deleted or forgotten. This has a negative impact on your participation rate.

In addition, the more time that has passed since the event, the less the participants remember. Valuable information, such as the participants’ impressions, is thus lost.

Nevertheless, collecting feedback after an event is a good method that is relatively easy to implement with easyfeedback. To do so, simply create a feedback survey and send the invitation to the participants after the event.

But there is also another possibility, which Dennis introduces to you in today’s Insights, namely to collect feedback during the event.

2. Get feedback during the event

If you collect the feedback during the event, you have the advantage that the participants are still in the topic and can remember all impressions well. In a seminar, it makes sense to include the feedback as a fixed program item at the end of the training, for example shortly before the closing words. Usually, all participants are still present at this point, so you can expect a very high participation rate. By integrating feedback as a fixed program item in the seminar, there is an indirect “obligation” for the participants to take part.

At a large event, such as a trade fair, it is somewhat more difficult to get the participants to provide feedback, since direct contact is lacking. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to place a feedback survey at the end of a presentation, for example, in order to filter the impressions in the best possible way.
With easyfeedback you can easily generate a QR code. You can then display this on a screen or beamer and draw the attention of the participants to it. The participants can then simply scan the QR code with their smartphone and take part directly in the survey.

Collecting feedback while still at the event thus has several advantages over the classic method, in which feedback is collected after the event is over. In particular, the personal contact on site has a positive effect on the participation rate. You should use this advantage to get the feedback that is important for you.

Finally, two tips from Dennis:

#1 Refrain from personalization

Refrain from personalization if it is not explicitly necessary. This increases the probability of receiving honest and constructive feedback. This makes sense especially in a small circle, for example at a seminar, because otherwise the participants fear to be recognized by their evaluation.

#2 Use incentives

To increase the participation rate, you can offer small incentives for taking part. This will increase the motivation to participate and gain more feedback on your event. Plus, for handing over the incentive, you’ll receive your attendees’ contact information, and you’ll have gained leads as well – but that’s the topic of Dennis’ next Insight….

We hope you enjoyed the Insight and will soon be able to put the tips into practice. If you’re not sure which is the right time for you, try both and compare the results.

With this in mind – see you at the next Insight.

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