How do you solicit feedback and improve conference networking games and icebreakers?

1 Why feedback matters

Feedback is essential for any conference organizer who wants to create a memorable and valuable experience for their attendees. Feedback helps you understand what worked well, what didn't, and what can be improved. It also shows that you care about your attendees' opinions and satisfaction. By collecting and analyzing feedback, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your games and icebreakers, and make informed decisions for future events.

2 How to collect feedback

There are various ways to collect feedback from your attendees, depending on your goals, resources, and preferences. SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and Typeform are some of the most popular online tools for creating and sending surveys after the event. Poll Everywhere, Slido, and Mentimeter are great for displaying polls during or after your games and icebreakers. Interviews can provide open-ended questions about attendees' experiences and expectations. Also, observing attendees' behavior and reactions during games and icebreakers can offer valuable insights. Taking notes or recording videos of observations can be useful for later analysis.

3 How to analyze feedback

Once you have collected feedback from your attendees, you need to analyze it and draw insights. To do this, you can organize and categorize your feedback data with online tools like Excel, Google Sheets, or Airtable. This can help you sort, filter, group, or label your feedback by different criteria. You can also use tools like WordClouds, Text Analyzer, or MonkeyLearn to visualize and summarize your feedback data. Additionally, you can look for patterns and trends in your feedback data, such as common themes, opinions, preferences, or issues. You may also be able to find outliers or anomalies in your data. Finally, you can interpret and evaluate your feedback based on your goals and expectations. By asking yourself questions about the strengths and weaknesses of your games and icebreakers, you can identify opportunities for improvement.

4 How to improve your games and icebreakers

Based on your feedback analysis, you can take actions to improve your games and icebreakers for future events. For instance, you can keep the elements that made successful games and icebreakers successful such as the format, content, facilitator or timing. On the other hand, you could change or eliminate the elements of unsuccessful games and icebreakers such as instructions, difficulty, relevance or diversity. Additionally, you could try new games and icebreakers that address feedback or suggestions from attendees or experiment with new elements that may enhance the games and icebreakers such as technology, theme, interaction or learning.

5 How to measure your improvement

Finally, you need to measure your improvement and see if your actions have resulted in better games and icebreakers. You can use the same methods and tools that you used to collect and analyze feedback before, and compare the results. You can also use metrics like attendance, retention, satisfaction, referrals, or revenue to measure your improvement. By measuring your improvement, you can validate your assumptions, celebrate your achievements, and identify new areas for improvement.