How to Make Better Use of Surveys Regarding Large Corporate Meetings By Nick Spoke

Unless there’s a reward for their time, few people love filling out surveys. However, as someone planning a large-scale meeting or event uniting people from multiple branches of a corporation, employees of different companies or potential investors and customers, you know how important they can be. There’s no other way to produce quantifiable data on how successful your event was, especially if attendance was mandatory or you weren’t worried about selling tickets. The problem is knowing how to make use of surveys effectively, and how to fit surveys into your extremely hectic schedule before, during and after the event.

Your best resource is an online service that specializes in meeting planning and analytics. With their assistance, your surveys will prove more multi-layered and the data you’re able to glean will prove more useful. Compiling data is only a small part of the survey’s usefulness. The right service will show you how to get even more useful data, and how to plan your event accordingly and present your statistics to the event’s investors to show them their much return on investment. That means thinking about when you collect survey responses and how you do it; the same multiple-choice or rating questions you’ve used for years won’t suffice.

Pose the Right Questions

Surveys are only useful if you collect the right data from the responses – and that starts with asking the right questions. An online service that specializes in planning large-scale company events can help you by customizing your questions to suit your industry, your company goals and the goals on the event. They can even help you design a way of extracting useful data from open-ended questions, as it’s difficult to get a clear picture from multiple-choice and rating questions alone.

Make the Survey Multilingual

The more international your guest list, the more important it is to consider making the survey multilingual. At the very least, make it available in both English and Spanish to encourage employees for whom English is a second language to give the most detailed comprehensive answers. A meeting planning and analysis service can even help you with survey translation so every voice is properly counted.

Recognize What to Do with the Data

Surveys after the meeting is over are essential for event analysis and calculating return on investment in addition to planning future events, but that’s not the only time you should be collecting data. Ask attendees or representatives from different departments to respond to surveys even before the event to determine the answers to questions such as, "What do you hope to get from the event?" and "What do you plan to contribute to the event?" This helps you plan a more tightly focused and meaningful meeting because you can plan for speakers, panels and other activities that tie into the most frequent responses to these surveys.

Even mid-event surveys can prove useful, if you encourage participants to answer questions at computer stations set up throughout the venue. With the assistance of meeting planning software, you can analyze the answers fast enough to give investors updates as the meeting unfolds concerning how the participants are responding. You’ll even be able to tweak the proceedings as necessary in light of the data.

Surveys are the single most valuable asset when it comes to determining an event’s return on investment and when deciding which aspects of the event worked so you can replicate them in future meetings. Relying on an online service that helps you ask the right questions, translate the responses and compile all the data will make planning the most successful events as simple as possible.

About the Author: Nick Spoke is a human resources manager for a Fortune 500 company who often plans events with the help of MeetingMetrics, an online service for planning and analyzing large-scale meetings.

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