Are You Collecting Feedback and Measuring Your Event ROI? (The importance of event surveys)
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
Despite Albert Einstein’s wise words, how many of us have been guilty of doing precisely that when preparing for an upcoming event? If you’ve raised your hand in acknowledgement, it’s ok.
It’s happened to the best of us! When it comes to planning for the next event, it’s common to simply repeat what we think is our “winning formula”, then add a few bells and whistles to “make things better”. But do you really know if your tweaks will improve the event? How would you even know if a tweak in a certain area is necessary? The answer is simple. By collecting feedback and measuring your return on investment (ROI).
Because your audience (and numbers) will tell you everything you need to know about an event – including how, and where, to improve it. Here’s how you can accurately measure your next event’s ROI.
Event Surveys
There’s no better way of finding out how good your event was, than asking the people it was put on for – your audience. There are two ways of getting event surveys done:
Post-event surveys
Sit your audience down in a room (or hall), then ask everyone to fill in a printed event survey. Be sure to ask them for their opinions on every item in the agenda.
This way, you’ll know what speakers, booths, entertainment items and presentations were winners – and which ones should be dropped from future shows/conferences.
The only problem with this? The loads of paperwork, manual entries and analysing that will need to take place after the event. (We assure you it’ll all be worth it though!)
Alternatively, you can skip the post-event paperwork and analysis with the PowerVote Voting System. Event participants simply input their answers into a keypad (which we will provide) and their answers will be stored in our system.
Next, we’ll generate a report with a comprehensive analysis of the results from every question. You can even cross reference participants and questions so you’ll know who enjoyed each item (and who did not).
During-event surveys
If we had to choose, we’d definitely recommend asking participants questions as your event is going on (as opposed to only collecting their feedback at the end).
Your audience won’t need to think back on the past few days’ events to decide if they enjoyed a particular presentation – they’d instantly give you an accurate answer, as long as you ask for their opinion during the presentation itself. (Or the moment the speaker leaves the stage.)
With timely survey questions, you can capture accurate, detailed feedback that will be incredibly useful when planning your next event.
But, just how can you collect feedback during an event, without disrupting the flow of activities? It’s simple with the PowerVote Event App (which, by the way, does this and a few dozen other incredibly useful things event planners love).
Measuring Your ROI
Once you have your event feedback and figures (i.e. how much money you made from your event, how many leads you gained, or how much publicity you generated from it), it’s easy to determine if your investment paid dividends, or struck out. There’s good news, regardless of whether or not your event returned a positive ROI.
Because as long as you keep collecting feedback and analysing your results (hopefully with a voting system or event app), you can be sure your next event will do even better. And better. And better.
