Corporate events, unlike your kid’s birthday for example, are a bit more difficult to measure. When it comes to your kid’s birthday, if your kid is happy and the other parents didn’t shame you on a Whatsapp group, things went well. When it comes to your corporate event, there are many more moving parts and different shades of grey.
Obviously, you hope your guests had a blast. But unless you ask them, you will never truly know. Post event surveys are the best way to turn subjective feelings into cold hard facts…and a great way to learn invaluable insights.
The three reasons to collect feedback
In today's result-driven world, there are 3 key reasons why you absolutely need to collect feedback from your guests to measure how your event went down.
The first is that you always have to justify it to your organization ( your boss, CFO etc..). They will want to know what your competition is doing. Once you have that data, you’re already one step ahead and showing the value your event is bringing. This also builds trust that you know what you’re doing and will help loosen the purse strings moving forward.
The second, is because ultimately, you want each event you plan to be better than the last. The best way to do this is showing the data. If your last event had 70% of guests show up and only 65% said they really enjoyed themselves, and the next event the numbers went up, you’re obviously learning and improving. Obviously, there are a number of parameters you want to measure, but we’ll get into that a bit later.
The third reason is to engage your employees (assuming the event is internal). Everyone likes to be heard. A personalized survey is the best way to hear from each and every employee. You can also make it anonymous so people feel free to speak their mind.
Asking the right questions:
There are two main types of events. Ones that are a celebration and ones that have a more knowledge and goal oriented purpose.
Think about it as a new year’s celebration vs a workshop.
With the first type of event, you want to measure such things as overall satisfaction, connectedness, identification with the brand and so on and so forth. When it comes to events with a focus on knowledge transfer, problem solving etc…the questions you want to ask are more geared to understanding just how effective the event was, how much did they learn, how it helped them be equipped to do their job better and so on and so forth.
The right and wrong way of doing surveys:
Surveys can either seem like homework or they can be fun. When it comes to a survey that is coming right after a hopefully amazing event, the best way to make it fun is by combining pictures from the event itself within the flow of the questions.
We found that the best way to put a survey together is by combining the 4-5 best practice questions which are as follows:
- How satisfied were you with the event?
- What part of the event did you enjoy the most?
- How likely are you to attend events with us again?
- Would you recommend this event to others?
- How can we improve the event?
In addition to these, you definitely want to include questions that pertain to your specific type of event and its goals that you defined at the planning stages.
We also highly recommend mixing it up a bit with a few fun questions. That could be anything from guess how many litres of alcohol were consumed to how many songs were played to how many calories were dished out…
Easier than Sunday morning
With Purple’s Feedback Generator, you can literally create a survey in less than a minute. We provide different suggestions for questions based on the type of event and the type of guests, as well as providing the design and flow of the survey with all the images that have been shared to the platform from your guests.
With one click of a button, you can send out the personalized survey to each and every guest, and get all the answers back in one sleek and intuitive dashboard.
Presentation is everything:
Collecting data is only one part of the battle. The second part is presenting it. You know better than anyone just how busy your boss is, so you want to leave an impression. Your dashboard that not only highlights the event’s data, but provides easy navigation to show how it measures up to the competition, and how it did compared to past events you’ve organized.
This not only gives your boss and other key stakeholders the confidence that the event was worthwhile, it gives them the confidence that you’re the mastermind behind all of it and the sky's the limit for future events.
