How I helped an event management guy to collect feedback from the crowd

Big events like music festivals or tech events, get a lot of footfall, hence loads of feedbacks too, but in a lot of different ways! It's difficult to get and analyze the feedbacks when you have so many participants. Let me tell you how I met John :

Last Tuesday, 6 pm, time to come back home. On the road, a friend calls me and tell me that he is going, with some of our common friends, have a drink somewhere. My answer was short: "I'm coming".

A lot of people were there, we talked, drank, and had a good time. But, one guy got to my attention and curiosity. I had never seen him before, he was nice but after sometime I saw that he ended the conversation, and stayed focus on his phone. He was really concerned about something.

I was too curious … After a while, we begin to talk to each other and he shared his story:

"I am the president of a big event organization. Last week, we organized a music festival, but since two days the feedbacks on the social media have become crazy. Apparently to people, the event was not really well organized as compared to last year. We invested so much time and money to do this event. A lot of big artists came, and everything was well planned. Still, the attendants were not happy in the end.

Now, we are trying to know what went wrong and how to fix it for the next year, but you know what, you can't control people on the social media ... every comment becomes a big deal"

I understood why he was so concerned, but I was surprised that he just considerd the feedback from the social media space, so I ask him how he is collecting his event's feedbacks directly from the attendees.

"Social media gives to us an unprecedented opportunity for connecting with our customer. While there are numerous social networks that provide you with a vast array of tools. But it's important to realize that simply having a social media presence is no guarantee of success. This is why we take feedbacks directly during the event: most of the time we hire 4 peoples, to request completion of questionnaires to the participants. But this technique isn't the best one, that's difficult to do it. Imagine that you have a lot of preparation to do: do the survey, print it, ask people to write on a piece of paper … And the most complicated part is to collect and to enter the data into a computer, to analyze it later. You know, we organized for example, this festival: people don't take time to write and answer correctly to the questions, we lost a lot of surveys in the crowd …Also, there is a good amount of margin for human error while entering the responses into computer systems. I mean, you can well imagine, how crazy it can be while reading through hand writings from the crowd who is in a real hurry to finish the survey and continue to their plans in their events.”

He continued, “I mean that surveys are essential when you organize an event, but it takes a lot of time, and a lot of investment in manpower and money. This is why we rely more on the results of the social media. But it's uncontrollable, a lot of little negatives feedbacks become a big deal eventually."

This guy made a lot of sense: he explained to me how it's hard to manage these kind of events, every positive and negative aspect of the way they are collecting feedbacks, with surveys or in social media. And that sounds not really easy.

Then looking at his use case, I thought of BrewSurvey and introduced it to him. This smart and easy survey application software allows you to remotely publish your survey on all your mobile devices from a cloud-based dashboard. The dashboard gives an easy interface to create, manage, and read the analyses of your survey.

No more papers and pens! You don't need to create your survey a long time in advance, to calculate how many photocopying you have to do, with the risk that when all this process is over you see that something is wrong on your paper and you go back to square one. In Brew, you can create, edit, and delete your surveys whenever you want and it is done in no time.

You can easily make your survey attractive (colors, image, logo ...). Your audience doesn't need a support for writing down … just touch the screen and give responses. A nice design of the questions always leaves a nice impression to the end users.

You don't need Internet connection as well while taking the surveys. In this kind of event, where at times, the internet networks are saturated and devices go offline, data is safely stored in the app until the device is reconnected.

Gathering, analyzing, and sharing responses is not always easy, it requires a lot of time, and it is often a source of discouragement even before creating your survey. With Brew Survey it's so easy! An analysis of your survey is available: detailed insights include a total number of unique respondents, average time of complete the survey, completion ratio, drop-off from surveys, etc.

You can analyze your responses according to the segmentation you did of your audience. For example, if you segmented your audience according to age, genre of music, which they listen to, then you will also be able to easily export these results into an excel file from the dashboard itself.

After this long conversation, John was really interested, and in thanks he gave me a free ticket for his next event. You can do the same gesture ;)