As an event planner, your work isn’t done after the last attendee leaves the venue. In fact, some of your most critical work is just getting started. When the dust settles, it’s time to dive in for post-event feedback from everyone. Connecting with your guests, speakers, vendors, and support teams will help you improve your roadmap for the next event. These are the incredible benefits you can expect to leverage when you scoop up all those valuable post-event opinions and feedback.
1. Gauge the Overall Sentiments About Your Event
You might think you planned a world-level event. But if your guests respond to follow-up emails and surveys, citing mediocre experiences, you know there are improvements to be made. Checking in with attendees and guests on social media can help you gauge how everyone “felt” about the event’s atmosphere, purpose, and results, too.
2. Identify Which Key Takeaways Resonated Most
Engaging with everyone within the first few days of the event’s finality is a great time to find out what key takeaways resonated with them the most. Did the core message of your event inspire those who came? Maybe attendees are bragging online about meeting new people. Others might be raving about the food you had to offer. Whatever praises they’re singing, take notice. Those are the event elements you did right, and you can use those for future event planning.
3. Did Attendees Appreciate the Guest Speakers?
Consider sending follow-up emails to inquire about how everyone felt about your event’s guest speakers. Whether you had keynote event headliners or breakout workshops with various speakers, gauge how responsive your attendees were to their messages. Finding out what everyone appreciated most about your lineup this year will help you plan for an equally impressive or more inspirational event next year.
4. Would they Come Again Next Year?
There are plenty of industry “tips” out there about what questions to ask as part of your post-event feedback efforts. And, for the most part, they’re usually actionable nuggets of advice. However, one of the most important questions your survey or email should ask is about whether or not they’d sign up now to come to the next one. A response in either direction will be incredibly beneficial to how to go about event planning for next year.
5. Are There Event Planning Improvements to Take Away?
The biggest benefit of asking for post-event feedback is learning in what areas you, as a planner, could do to make the next event even better. Good, bad, and even the ugliest of comments could lead to breakthrough ideas for your next effort. Be open to accepting praise and criticism. Put them to good use as you carve out areas for improvement.
6. It’s Just Another Way to Say Thanks
For some event planners, they don’t see attendees or guests again until the next event. And as much as you feel you doled out your “thank yous” the final night, following up for feedback later just provides another opportunity to say it again. Reinforce those connections to attendees, speakers, and vendors by calling or reaching out to say thanks. And while you’re chatting, ask them what they thought about the event.
There are plenty of benefits to asking for post-event feedback from your guests. These are just a few of the most notable. If you’re registered to attend The Event Planner Expo 2022, you can expect a follow-up from us, too! Although, we sort of already know it’s going to be the year’s biggest get-together.
