How to Leverage your Community Feedback
Last updated
Last updated
In every event there will be things participants love and some things they may not love as much. And as a , you'll want to optimise your events and cater events suitable to the community's needs. You'll be able to do so with an effective feedback loop - an important part to any event planning or community management. Here's what you can expect from this post:
Why is feedback important?
What strategies can you use for feedback?
How do you encourage community members to fill out your feedback form?
What do you do with post-event feedback?
Craft your own feedback forms with our question bank.
By crafting appropriate questions, a post-event survey can help determine the event's overall success, provide invaluable insights about various aspects like catering, venue, itinerary, manpower etc., and most importantly it will provide you with actionable items to help improve your event planning for the future.
Not all feedback will leave you with a sigh of relief - some feedback may bring you frustration and even discouragement, but it is important to remember that every piece of feedback is valuable, and will allow you to learn and grow your community with better strategies.
For a start, you can explore different formats like social media polls, and the more commonly used Google Form (or other online survey platforms).
If you'd like deeper insights and more qualitative answers, you can consider having town hall meetings for open discussions and real-time feedback. There are also focus groups which can help limit the group discussion size and encourage more insightful responses.
It's easy to craft your survey and distribute it, but it is harder to get members to fill it out and provide constructive feedback. Besides offering incentives for completing the survey, think about gamifying the experience like what you can do with Onboard.
Add XP to your feedback form using quest tags like #VISIT.
Offer discount coupons or voucher redemptions upon completion of the feedback form or after gaining a certain amount of XPs.
Send your feedback form as soon as the event ends (or within 24 hours), as the event is still fresh and participants would be more willing to respond.
Ensure that your forms are sent to the right people, i.e., participants form should go to participants, crew feedback forms should go to the crew etc.
Try adding a personal touch for those who have not responded within the week - send them the link again via direct or private messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and so on.
Use it! Discuss with your team to create a new strategy for your community events, and communicate your changes to your members. This will show your members that you value their feedback and want to nurture a collaborative community culture.
However, be wary that not all complaints can be resolved and you should still exercise your own judgement to decide which are the most important and necessary improvements for your community. Still, you may address the issue and explain your position in order to encourage a continuous feedback loop going forward.
Event planning is all about trial and error sometimes, and so is gathering feedback. Try out new things to see if they work, and if they don't, it's completely okay! That's the beauty of improving, learning and growing as you go - there is no one "fixed" solution and there's always so much to work on. Check out our and we're certain you'll be a professional feedback form creator in no time!
