We all know attendee satisfaction is key to event success. Nothing is more crucial than making sure your attendees are having a great time. Your conference brand is dead in the water if your attendees had a bad experience and walked away without their expectations met. If you can’t measure the mood of your attendees, you won’t be able to identify how best to push it even higher, and you won’t be able to zoom in on areas that need fixing.
It is important to keep in mind that attendee engagement and attendee satisfaction are not the same things. Rather, the former helps to inform the latter. The key difference is that engagement helps to contextualize overall attendee satisfaction, creating a more robust and insightful post-event analysis.
Here are some points put together for how engagement can be measured alongside attendee satisfaction, and the overall success of your event.
Repeat Registrations:
One of the most important ways an individual can show contentment towards your event is by being a repeat attendee. Keep a close track of all the individuals who visited your event twice or even thrice to set realistic goals for future events.
Session Rating:
Sessions are a core aspect of the event experience for attendees and collecting feedback which helps to understand the holistic picture of attendee satisfaction. Ideally, attendees should be able to rate sessions as soon as they are over since this is the time when the experience is fresh in their minds.
Post Event Surveys:
In order to make this survey as useful as possible, try to keep most of the questions one-click replies and not open-ended responses. Multiple choice, numerical scales, and yes-or-no questions work best because that aggregates the results in a manner that’s fairly easy to make sense of.
Capturing Live Social Media Activity:
It is a good practice to capture attendee satisfaction in real time. Best way to implement this is to set up a social media hub that aggregates all content related to your event. Track the number of posts, shares, and likes that your event content receives across platforms. Repost and reply to them, in real time to get the engagement going.
By correctly identifying the areas of satisfaction and effectiveness the event wishes to achieve, and then using a wide range of tools, technologies, and methods to accurately measure attendee satisfaction, one can establish a far clearer picture of the achievements and weaknesses.
