The Value of Post-Event Surveys for Meetings and Incentive Travel

Value of Post-Event Surveys for Meetings and Incentive Travel

Countless hours go into planning an event, whether it be an incentive trip for your top producers, a sales kick-off for your sales force, or a user conference to promote and educate people on your products and service offerings. You generally leave the event with a feeling about whether it was a success or not. However, the best way to measure the true success of your event is to send out post-event surveys to the attendees to ask for their feedback. It is recommended that you send this out no later than 48 hours after the event. This helps ensure that the event is still fresh on their mind when answering the questions. Below are a few categories that are critical to measuring a successful attendee experience.

Evaluating Registration

Regardless if you are hosting a President’s Club Trip, meeting, or conference, your attendee’s first impression of the event is the website and registration. Gathering feedback on the registration process allows you to measure the success of your registration platform. Whether you are utilizing a third-party platform such as Aventri, CVENT, Eventbrite, or you have created your own, it is important to know how the attendee registration experience was. Feedback on the website and registration should include questions about whether the information was helpful, user friendly, and overall, easily accessible.

Evaluating Vendors

During the event, your attendees will have contact with several vendors such as greeters, drivers, front desk staff, bell desk staff, etc. The vendors you use are an extension of your team and you want to ensure they are providing the level of service that you expect. Receiving attendee feedback about your vendors will provide you with invaluable information on whether you should use the vendor again for future events. When asking for feedback on vendors, you should include questions about the timeliness of transfers, cleanliness of the property, helpfulness of hotel staff, food and beverage quality, and overall experience at the hotel.

Review of Onsite Experience

If you are hosting a President’s Club Trip, you should consider gathering feedback on activities, gifting experiences, and hosted events such as the welcome reception and awards dinner. It is also helpful to know how they felt about the qualification rules and if they felt the goals were reasonable and fair. On the other hand, if you are hosting a conference or meeting, it is important to collect feedback on items such as the agenda, speakers, presenters, and most importantly, meeting content.

Looking to the Future

Now that you have completed your post-event surveys, utilizing the feedback is crucial to planning future events. It allows you to be more strategic and focused on what your attendees want and need from your events. The end goal, whether it be a club trip or a conference, is for your attendees to feel valued by their company, empowered with knowledge, and motivated to excel.

Developing a Benchmark

When formulating your survey, it is important to first decide on a rating scale you will use throughout the entire survey. There are three popular scales used to tabulate survey feedback – number scales, word scales, or a combination of both. Number scales are typically either 1-5 or 1-10, while word scales typically include selections such as very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, neutral, or satisfied. At Brightspot, we recommend utilizing a combination of both number and word scales, like the example below.

1 = Very Dissatisfied

2 = Dissatisfied

3 = Neutral

4 = Satisfied

5 = Very Satisfied

Using numbers and words allows respondents to associate how they feel with a word and value. The word association allows respondents to easily justify selecting an answer while the number value allows you to quantify the response. Quantifying the response is important so you can develop a benchmark.

It is also suggested to have additional comments portion of your survey. This allows the attendee to write out any comments or concerns they have that may not have already been addressed in previous questions.

Brightspot is happy to assist you in creating a survey tailored to your event. We will make recommendations on how to ask the right questions to get the exact information you need to make your next event even better! Drop us a line and let’s start dreaming up bright ideas.