How surveys can boost your event success
The goal of any conference or event is to be successful. But how do you define event success? Many define it by looking at growth - or your ability to attract more people to the next one, and even more people to the one after. So how can you affect growth? Here are some ideas:
- Provide content that your demographic wants to learn.
- Bring speakers that your attendees want to see.
- Choose locations where your attendees will want to leave their family and friends and go.
- Provide experiences they won’t likely get anywhere else.
Typically, you can get a pretty accurate feeling on how successful you were at providing the above, but nothing beats going to the source and asking the people who matter - your attendees, the right questions.
Measure and learn with surveys
If you’ve already run one successful (or maybe not successful) conference or event, no problem, you know the people who are likely to attend so any survey response is highly valuable. If you have yet to run your first conference or event, then you need to have the the understanding that some of your respondents may never come, even if you provide them with everything they want.
Running an effective survey requires a few pre-planning considerations namely, length, goal, and the value to respondent.
Keep it short
You don’t want your survey too long. The longer the survey the greater chance a potential respondent will not make it to the end. A way to combat the length issue is by having multiple shorter more directed surveys. Many organizations I’ve spoken with do one massive post conference or event survey that does not get much traction. Shorter, session related surveys that someone can complete once the session is over on a single page and drop into a box, or better yet through their mobile device, the better the chance of having them complete the survey and you getting the results you need.
Set Goals
There is an entire field of study on survey and survey methodology, I won’t get into that too much, however the very first step is determining what your goal is. The simpler the goal the simpler the survey will be, and the easier it will be analyze.
- Is your goal to rate the speakers and only invite the great ones back?
- Is it figuring out which marketing tactic that brought the most people to your event?
- Is it determining the greatest value you brought to your constituency?
All all are great questions, however getting to the bottom of any of those questions will require several well constructed questions to ensure you are getting the best actionable answers.
Provide value
Yes it is human nature to help out, however when you are asking people to commit a reasonable amount of time (anything over 1 minute) then you need to create value for them. That can be as simple as thanking them for their time and their efforts will help make a better conference next year, thus making them your champions, or you can incentivize it with a fixed reward (eg everyone gets a discount off the next event), or a limited big ticket reward that all respondents are entered into, however few will win (eg win 1 of 5 free tickets to come back next year).
Stay tuned, in the next blog post I will go over the different ways to tease out the answers from your attendee population.