You only improve by learning from your mistakes, but how can you tell if a conference was a success and what you could be doing better? You need feedback. Specifically, you need useful, practical feedback. Getting it from the people who attended your Phuket conference venue can be a challenge, however. In some cases, the feedback might be worthless praise. In others, it could be spiteful hate. Here’s how to gather the best feedback to help make your next event even better than the last.
Start gathering feedback before the end of the event
If you leave the feedback phase until long after the event, memories of specific niggles or highlights might have faded, becoming only general impressions that are worthless to you. While that’s no excuse to completely ditch post-event feedback, you should also canvas for opinion at other stages of the process, including during the event. You could even include feedback time in the schedule.
Give an incentive to give feedback
Useful feedback will be a lot more forthcoming if attendees feel that there is some benefit to them for giving it. A simple way to do this is to make the feedback form dual-sided so that it doubles as a prize draw ticket. If they don’t give you feedback, they don’t get entered into the draw and can’t win a prize. Alternatively, you could offer discounts on services or future events in return for completed feedback forms.
Make it easy to give feedback
Phuket conference venues are getting more and more technological advanced, and events have to keep up with that trend in order to remain relevant. One way to do that is to have a conference app or website, which can help people to keep track of the schedule, download handouts, find conference rooms and also give feedback. Anything you can do to make the process as easy as possible for the attendees will dramatically increase the likelihood of getting useful feedback in bulk, and incorporating feedback into the event’s digital solutions is certainly a good way to make things easy.
Don’t use a generic feedback template
If you ask people generic questions, you’ll get generic answers. Instead, ask very specific questions. Ideally, you don’t want to ask too many. It’s better to get a detailed answer to one question than short answers to 20. Don’t forget to also give the option to provide positive feedback. If you frame every question as though you’re looking for problems, you will almost certainly find them in abundance.