How can you balance event feedback to avoid bias and errors?

2 Choose your sources

Feedback can come from various sources, such as attendees, speakers, sponsors, staff, partners, and vendors. Each source can provide valuable insights, but they can also have different expectations, interests, and biases. Therefore, you need to choose your sources carefully and balance their feedback accordingly. For example, you might weight feedback from your target audience more than feedback from your competitors. You might also seek feedback from different segments of your audience, such as loyal customers, new prospects, or influencers.

3 Use multiple methods

Feedback can be collected using different methods, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, polls, reviews, ratings, comments, or analytics. Each method can have its advantages and disadvantages, depending on your goals, resources, and audience. Therefore, you need to use multiple methods and compare their results to get a more comprehensive and accurate picture of your event performance. For example, you might use surveys to get quantitative feedback, interviews to get qualitative feedback, and analytics to get behavioral feedback.

4 Avoid common pitfalls

Feedback can be affected by various factors that can introduce bias and errors, such as timing, wording, framing, sampling, response rate, or interpretation. Therefore, you need to avoid common pitfalls and apply best practices to ensure the validity and reliability of your feedback data. For example, you might ask for feedback soon after the event, use clear and neutral language, avoid leading or loaded questions, use random and representative samples, incentivize or remind respondents, and use objective and consistent criteria.

5 Act on your findings

Feedback is useless if you don't act on it. Therefore, you need to analyze your feedback data, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and implement changes or improvements based on your findings. This will help you enhance your event quality, increase your customer satisfaction, and achieve your event goals. For example, you might use feedback to improve your event design, content, delivery, or marketing. You might also use feedback to communicate your results, celebrate your achievements, or thank your stakeholders.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?