Open Forum

Our company has noticed a decrease in our Survey response rates for our presenters/instructors that we use multiple times a year. We try to only survey individuals once a quarter, every three months, but still, are not seeing the response rates we would like.

We survey our presenters/instructors with customer service based questions to see where our teams, who coordinate events, can improve the point of contact between our team and the presenter/instructor. We've had our questions for some years and those who do respond seem to 'Christmas Tree' down the ratings giving us high ratings but little to no valuable feedback for improvement. Our Metrics are great but don't provide us with how we can improve.

We're reaching out to the CVENT Community to see if there was/is anyone in our shoes. We'd like to know what you did to turn-around your response rates.

• Did you change your questions up? Ask more open-ended questions to obtain more valuable information?
• Did it seem like individuals were reluctant to complete the survey when comments are required for each question?
• Did you send out more reminders to complete the survey? (Our team currently sends one email to invite them to participate and another as a reminder to complete.)
• Did you change the design of your survey or emails to be more appealing?
• Did you provide a statement in emails that underscore the importance of completing the survey?

Any feedback or advice would be welcome. Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond to our discussion.

#Miscellaneous
#ReportingandInsights
#ExecutingStrategicMeetingsManagement

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Jessica Boss
Training and Support Team Lead
Fedstar
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For the majority of surveys we get very little response

For something like a presenter that we need to get response from. We would probably make it a mandatory part of the contract. We also generally try to keep it around 5-8 questions. Take a step back and say does this question give us the information we need to know if we are doing the right thing or need to improve things? If you can't decide on an answer then its time to change the question.  Generally anonymous responses get more feedback than those where a name is attached. If we put open ended questions we typically put a word count requirement or a max, so they understand the length of answer we are looking for.

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Kim Schechter
Program and Administrative Manager
Executive Director Inc.
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For our customer satisfaction survey this year, we're actually partnering with Tango (like Cvent uses for rewards) to try and incentive our customers to complete the survey. We usually get about a 25% response rate, but would like to see more.

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Rebecca Quinn
Corporate Events Manager
Transplace Texas, LP
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We are going to be sending out a membership survey and will probably add a $5 voucher for our members to apply to purchases in our store. :)
Wonder if using payment credits would increase participation?

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Steven Schlossman
Jack of all trades. Master of none.
BMW Car Club of America
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I think getting people to fill out surveys overall is hard. I know you try to limit but we find it's best to reach them while at the event closer in real time and they're engaged, because once they're gone, they moved on.  Alternatively offering a prize or incentive tends to yield us our best results (i.e. a $5 starbucks giftcard or one lucky winner to get a drone or ipad)

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Rachel Sigley
Branding
Tata America International Corporation
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Are you administering the surveys exclusively via Cvent's survey feature? If you use CrowdCompass for your events' apps I would suggest creating a stock powerpoint slide that you can send out (or add yourself) to your presenters presentations at the very end to remind the audience to take the survey, either via the app, push notification, or have them check their email. If you do not require anonymity in your responses you could also incentivize with $5 Starbucks gift cards, etc. for those who complete 100% of survey responses, etc.

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Chelsea Benge
Events Software Specialist
Leading Real Estate Companies of the World
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Thank you, everyone, for replying to this discussion! There are a lot of great ideas provided and we really appreciate them. Unfortunately, due to restrictions, we are unable to provide incentives to our presenters. Though it sounds like most of you have had success with that.

We currently send out the survey on the last day of the event to try to catch them before their next project. As we use some of the same presenters on a regular basis we try to only survey 3 a month. A very small number. We have about 15 events a month, but the same presenters may be used for multiple events during that timeframe. So we don't want to burn them out with surveys for each event.

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Jessica Boss
Training and Support Team Lead
Fedstar
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Surveys have such a low completion rate! You will lose people with open-ended questions, so are there ways you can change your questions to better pinpoint the feedback you want? Another option is to bribe them - hold a drawing for a gift card for everyone who completes a survey by a certain date. :)
We have a higher rate of response, because the only way our attendees can receive their CPE (continuing education) certificate is by filling out the survey. :)

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Lori Wildman
Senior Marketing Manager
DuCharme McMilllen & Associates
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