Follow Up To Get Quality Event Feedback

"Well, how did it go?" asked the CEO as he wandered past Siobhan's desk on his weekly tour of the offices. He was referring to the conference Siobhan had organized and run to involve their industry in standardization guidelines. Although her first impression was that the conference was a real success, she knew that she only had a small proportion of the total feedback. "I'm still in the middle of collecting feedback data", admitted Siobhan, "but the initial data looks more po...

Keywords:

online booking, event managment,booking mananger, booking, registration

Article Body:

"Well, how did it go?" asked the CEO as he wandered past Siobhan's desk on his weekly tour of the offices. He was referring to the conference Siobhan had organized and run to involve their industry in standardization guidelines. Although her first impression was that the conference was a real success, she knew that she only had a small proportion of the total feedback. "I'm still in the middle of collecting feedback data", admitted Siobhan, "but the initial data looks more positive than we hoped. I'll have the full results at next week's review meeting."

Seminars, roadshows or workshops are held for a very specific reason and they will belong in one of the following categories:

• To generate sales opportunities for your products or services

• To spread information or increase productivity throughout an organization

• To raise general awareness about a topic

• To gain support for a change (political, legal, social or environmental)

It may be tempting, once the event is over, to sit back and wait for a reaction but, because you have invested time, emotion and money into developing and running an event, you ought to be pro-active in testing its effectiveness. Events are like all other products, some do everything they were expected to do whereas others fall short and need to be improved either by modification or enhanced design, if they are to be repeated.

With an event you cannot expect to satisfy everyone 100%, but you can get close by understanding what worked and what did not. As you will see, not everyone is prepared to give their true opinion during or directly after the event and some degree of post-event follow-up will be necessary to draw a balanced picture of audience perception.

Because your delegates have different learning styles, you will not have seen a complete and considered reaction from all of them during your event.

Delegates, whatever their background, can be pigeon-holed into 4 categories:

• Activists

• Pragmatists

• Theorists

and

• Reflectors

The activists and pragmatists are most likely to have responded immediately to the information or activities that you provided as they enjoy interaction. Activists and pragmatists, by nature, have a strong tendency to engage and take on board new ideas. Pragmatists will test the realism of the new idea whereas activists just enjoy the thrill of the new.

Theorists, as you might expect, like to take time to break ideas down and think things through step-by-step. Reflectors prefer to gather information, stand back and consider things from different perspectives. Both of these learning types may need a little more time and space to assimilate what has been said and would probably respond well to a follow-up process.

Siobhan was right to hold back on boasting about her success. Some of the later feedback demonstrated that there were real practical problems that would take time and money to overcome. These had only surfaced once the delegates had returned to base to analyze the in-depth business implications for themselves.

Feedback Management

Speaking is easy, but listening can be very hard. Make sure that people understand you by using effective feedback methods. With proper feedback you can make sure that your message is coming through clear.

Keywords:

enterprise feedback management, survey, survey software, online surveys

Article Body:

Conversations can be a tricky business. Sometimes, decoding what is said with what is meant is difficult at best. However, communication is a necessary tool in todays world. And it’s not only speaking that can be difficult, but trying to interpret body language, and other language barriers are just a few of the obstacles barring effective communication. It’s often been the case were one party completely miscommunicates to another due to a misunderstanding between parties.

Most people learn to talk when they are relatively young. Gaining in verbal capacity as the get older and engage in conversation with more and more people throughout their lives. And while most people will spend their time constantly speaking, some never really learn to listen, which is the king of effective communication. It may seem strange to hear such a thing as this, but it’s true. Even though it may not sound true to the individual who just spent the last couple moments listening to some co-worker blather on about his fantasy football picks, but it is.

Without proper listening, speech communication would just be a lot of annoying sounds. Unfortunately, most of the time we spend listening, really is just the process of physically absorbing the annoying squawks and squeaks that come out of someone.

The problem with listening is that it’s so hard. It’s even harder to Listening actively. What’s required to listen actively is more difficult to learn than it was to learn to speak when we were young. It’s not something that can be absorbed through simply interacting with other humans. Active listening requires the receiver in the conversation to seek out among the speakers words and try to understand what the speaker is really saying. To fish through the emotion, defensiveness, cultural differences and jargon.

If it’s so hard to listen than it must be extremely hard to get some one to pay attention to what your saying

One of the most important elements of communication is creating effective feedback. Whether by picking up on non verbal cues or audible ones feedback is important. Knowing that your message is being understood correctly is vital. Feedback when done by the sender, allows the speaker a chance to make sure that the listener understands what is trying to be communicated. Someways to use feed back is through closed ended questions like "do you understand what I’m saying?" or " did that make sense?" Another effective tactic is using an open ended question and through this method the listener will hopefully summarize the message you have been trying to impart and in turn expose any misunderstandings between the two of you. Using a question like "what do you think about what I’ve just told you?" or "what are your feelings on the subject?" are both effective examples of using a open ended question in order to obtain clarification between the sender and the receiver.

In the business world feedback is even more crucial. Feedback from your employees, your clients, and customers plays an important role in creating and maintaining a business or institution. Making sure that they understand what your trying to say whether it’s through management or advertising. It’s important to know that, not only is your message getting through, but that it’s being interpreted correctly.

Once you’ve gained an understanding of how your information is being perceived and interpreted. You’ll know how to proceed, cutting of those things feedback has shown to be ineffective and replacing it with solutions known to produce the results you want.

Make sure that people understand what you are trying to say. Whether in marketing, management, or just everyday conversations. Through feedback, communication can be an effective tool in the world of business and everywhere else.