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Providing extra, valuable speaker content for completing a post-event survey could help encourage participation.
PCMA’s Catalyst community offers members a platform to ask each other questions, share ideas, or, as the website says, “communicate and collaborate.” Here’s a sampling from a recent Catalyst discussion.
“My association is looking to increase engagement with our post-event attendee surveys,” Rebekah McWain, CMP, director of events for Insights Association, wrote on the PCMA Catalyst forum. “Any suggestions on best practices?”
No best practices to share, but a wild idea: How about including some questions in the survey that would actually bring extra value to participants? Think of some questions on trends, maybe [open-ended] questions on pressing topics in the industry, stuff like that. Another idea: [Provide] some extra, valuable speaker content that they get after concluding the survey. Maybe some sort of a webinar? Final idea: Make the completion of the survey part of the closure of your event.
— Jan-Jaap In der Maur, CEO and Senior Moderator, Masters in Moderation
We’ve required … those needing CEUs/CE [credits to complete the survey] and that helps. You could also announce a drawing for a free membership or other prize for those who participate — [such as a] discount, even 10 percent off the next event, if they complete the survey.
— Sara Martin-Fuller, Special Events Senior Manager, Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education (AFCPE)
Sponsor Benefits
“My association has outgrown some of our annual sponsor benefits, specifically, our opportunity [for sponsors] to speak at a conference or webinar within a sponsor’s term,” Jennifer Whitlock, CMP, manager, conference and events for Merchant Advisory Group, posted on Catalyst. “We now have more annual sponsors than speaking opportunities and are looking for ways to limit or replace this benefit with something that our sponsors would find beneficial. Any suggestions on unique sponsor benefits your teams use? Anyone successfully removed/replaced a speaking benefit or something similar?”
We do a “Key Opinion Leader Roundtable” session — we allow each sponsor to propose a topic and have a designated table for each. So, let’s say we have 10 sponsors, we will then have 10 topic tables. At each table, we place four experts on that topic. The sponsors then rotate around the tables spending 10–15 minutes at each table. It does take a lot of curating in managing the topics, selecting the experts (lots of reminders), and having someone moderate the session (to time-keep, announce the rotations, etc.). Our sponsors love this session because it basically gives them mini focus groups.
— Lynn Brown, Director of Meetings and Business Development, American Society of Neuroradiology (ASNR)
- Read previous Catalyst discussions in our Catalyst Questions Archive.