Darren Edwards on session evaluation

Evaluating your sessions and events enables you to gather valuable insights from your attendees, sponsors and exhibitors

In the competitive world of trade shows, meetings, conferences, and conventions, you need accurate, timely feedback in order to determine future strategic plans for continued success and to keep your stakeholders coming back for more, event after event. In Part One of this topic we covered the following best practices: • Make the evaluation easy to complete • Keep the evaluation brief, in length • Put thought into your session evaluation

questions Here in Part Two we will continue to address the best practices for evaluating your events. SET ASIDE TIME TO COMPLETE EVALUATIONS A very common reason for low session evaluation response rates is that little or no time is left at the end of the session. Presenters and session moderators are often left with a sheepish look on their faces, half-heartedly reminding attendees to complete the session evaluation form. The trouble, obviously, is that the session has ended and the audience wants to get out to their break, or head over to lunch, or hit the road after a long day. Set five minutes aside and encourage attendees to participate. If you find your session has run overtime, I would encourage you to be mindful about forcing evaluations on attendees. If your crowd obviously wants to get out of there, you can always remind them at the start of the next session to complete evaluations for the last one. INCENTIVISE COMPLETION OF SESSION EVALUATIONS Another creative way to get around low response rates is to create incentives for attendees. If your event has sponsor giveaways, the raffle tickets could in part come from how many evaluations an attendee completes. If a giveaway prize isn’t available, a simple audience leader-board such as announcing the top evaluation performers, could be enough. Alternatively, you can appeal to an attendee’s sense of duty. When asking attendees to complete a session evaluation, remind them that the evaluations are a great benefit for

Darren Edwards is the founder of Invisage Creative Services in Australia. With more than 23 years experience in the meetings and events industry, Darren’s passion is to connect people through supply of creative design and innovative event tech...