✨ How to ask for feedback after an event

Did you know that I really believe that feedback is truly a gift? It's actually one of our community values at The Community Collective. But despite this, it can still feel super duper awkward and annoying to ask for feedback. 

Especially after an event where guests have just taken time out of their lives to attend and show up. 

Can we really go and ask them for ANOTHER THING? Hell yeah we can. 

And so we should. 

As event organisers and community builders, it's our role to understand how someone's experience was.

Without this feedback, how would we ever know if the event was actually worth their time? Let alone be able to improve the event for next time.

So here are my 4 tips for asking for feedback after your kick-ass event.

You ready? Cool. Let's dive in.

1) Never ask more than 3-4 questions

Keep it short and simple. People already spent a few hours at your event, they don’t need to spend hours writing about it. So let's stick with max 4 questions. Ideally there is 1-2 quantitative questions (e.g. On a scale of 1-4 how valuable was the event?) and 2 qualitative questions (e.g. What did you love?) to get a good snapshot of their experience.

2) Feedback is a gift, so give a gift back

Always incentivise attendees to give feedback. They are giving us a gift of feedback so let's thank them for that. 

What can you give them in return for them sharing their precious insights with you? I always offer something in return in our feedback forms e.g. Group Photos from the event, Key Takeaway Summary Notes, Discount for a tech tool, The Recording Link, Guest List, A Resource List - anything that shows that you care. It also increases the likelihood of attendees submitting the feedback because there is something that they want in return. 

I have actually done testing on this exact idea. For one event with 22 attendees, we shared the link with no incentive and we had 0 responses. For our next event with 24 attendees, we shared the link with 3 incentives and we had 11 responses. This gave us a fantastic snapshot of what nearly 50% of the people experience on the night. 

Here's an example of how to set up a gift with your feedback form:

1. Create an AirTable form link 

2. Populate it with questions 

3. Create the gift e.g. upload photos into a Google Drive and copy the shared 'View' link 

4. Save the Google Drive View link into the final 'Thank You' page of the Airtable form

And that's it! 

3) Ask the same questions every time over a long time

To actually make your event data valuable, it’s important to consistently ask the same questions after each event over a long period of time. This helps to analyse trends and to see which events were a hit. Plus if you can keep all your feedback in the one place (instead of individual Typeform responses) it’s soooo much easier to analyse. 

Here’s a sneak peak of our Meetup Feedback Data Dashboard built on Airtable to give you an idea of what this looks like:

It's also great to have the same feedback link for every meetup every time. Saves us from updating it each time! 

4) Make it anonymous

If you really want to hear how people’s experiences were, give people an opportunity to share anonymous feedback as they will feel more comfortable sharing the truth.

Alrighty that's all I've got for you... 

Just kidding! I'd love to share with you some actual question examples to show what these tips look like in practise. Let's go. 

Question Examples

Here are the questions we like to ask members after a private community meetup:

1. How useful did you find this meetup? (Scale 1-4) 

2. How likely are you to refer someone to join The CC? (NPS) (Scale 0-10)

3. What did you enjoy?

4. Anything to improve?

Here are the questions we like to ask after a public event:

1. How valuable did you find this event? (Scale 1-4) 

2. What did you enjoy?

3. Anything to improve?

4. Who else would benefit from joining our next event? OR Which speaker or topic would you like to learn about next?

You can see our feedback survey links for meetups here and public events here*. 

*It's important to have a 'I wasn't there' option to then logic jump straight to the end to allow people who couldn't make it to access the photos/slides/recording/your gift without having to submit feedback (because it would skew the data because they weren't actually there!).

Okay you made it. This is officially the end of the article now. 

Did you find it useful? You can share your feedback on this post here if you're feeling generous. I'll add a thoughtful reply to your comment as a thank you gift 🎁

You made it

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in your inbox on 17th to answer your most pressing questions.

Which reminds me, have a question you’d like to ask? Hit reply to let me know. I’d love to help you.

Until then,

Paz Pisarski
Co-Founder of The Community Collective

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See you next time.