1. Dont’ ask so many questions! It’s probably the most common mistake. It annoys the very people you are trying to satisfy.
2. Don’t ignore the results. People have committed their time to tell you their thoughts, if you ignore what they tell you or do nothing with the results, it annoys them too. Better still, make feedback a two way thing, communicate the results and what you have done with them to the people giving you the information.
3. Don’t irritate them by sending out word docs to print out, find an envelope, stamp and postbox. It’s a half baked approach and says you are more interested in making it convenient for you rather than the ‘customer’.
4. Keep the scales consistent and easy to understand. Having a scale ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ on one question, and ‘very satisfied’ to ‘strongly dissatisfied’ on the next, and even worse to reverse the scales on another is irritating and likely to yield bad data.
5. Don’t use words the recipient is baffled by. Most people don’t understand all the terminology you do, so ensure you know who you are asking.
6. Use routing as little as possible (if you answered 1 to this go to question 5, else go to question 3 if you answered 2). I have confused myself, so it is likely that most people will be too.
7. Don’t make the common section so small. If people have something to say they are not going to do it in 1 line.
8. Make text fields big enough for the data you are expected to receive in them. It is really annoying when you only have the equivalent of 5 characters for an email address.

That’s just the start!! Hope it has been useful.

1) Where possible, use an online booking system to gather attendee information. Free services like eventbrite.com are excellent, and are simple to use. The benefit of these is clear: you know who’s coming, all the admin is handled for you (like reminders, badges etc) and you develop a powerful attendee database from day 1.

2) Find out what people’s expectations are before hand. Knowing what people want to get out of the event often guides the event itself. It is more likely the event is successful if everyone is clear what is expected.

3) Involve the audience during the event and make it interactive. Most people are familiar with how to send a text-message, and free polling systems (like livefeedback.co.uk) can be used to gauge an audience’s view on any particular issue. This often equips speakers with a clearer understanding of the audience and helps the presentations.

4) Find out what people think after the event. How did it go? Did it meet expectations (if you knew them)? What can you learn from feedback?

5) Ask as little as possible. Keep surveys short and focussed on what you need to know. Don’t pre-empt what is important to the audience. Sometimes understanding an audience’s enthusiasm to attend a similar event in the future and why will tell you most of what you need to know.

6) Feedback what you learn to the speakers. Great speakers are encouraged by praise, and poor feedback will help highlight improvements to be made.

-Martin Kentish, Free Range People Ltd

You probably don’t know, but this site has been used for about 3 years now by hundreds of different companies to do thousands of different surveys. It worked really well, but it looked rather ugly (more like Google home page than a surveying system).  So here it is, the new look anyfeedback system available in new shiney orange.

If you have any comments, pop me a line (martin@freerangepeople.co.uk) or use our contact form.