Events are incredibly valuable for charities and nonprofits. Not only are they an effective way to raise funds, but they help raise awareness for your mission, steward existing donors, attract new supporters, and build relationships with your community. And fortunately for nonprofit professionals like you, there’s an easy way to gain even more value from events: collecting feedback from attendees.
Collecting feedback demonstrates to your donors and supporters that you value their input and ideas just as much as their financial backing. Plus, taking their suggestions and concerns into account can translate into more successful and profitable fundraising events in the future. Here are four ways you can collect useful feedback from your nonprofit event attendees.
1. Post-Event Surveys
The foundation of any feedback-collection efforts is post-event surveys. They’re generally easy to create, complete, and glean useful insights about attendee experiences at your event. You likely already use surveys of some sort, but it’s a good practice to review your surveys on a regular basis to ensure they’re formatted and framed properly.
Keep these best practices in mind when creating new or revising existing surveys:
- Ask clear and concise questions. Avoid any extraneous verbiage or content that might skew or influence responses.
- Vary the type of questions asked. This keeps respondents more engaged and more likely to provide valuable feedback. Consider using a mix of multiple choice, short answer, ratings, and other formats.
- Keep the overall survey short and focused. Don’t ask questions that are unrelated to the event you’re seeking feedback about to keep your response data clean.
- Segment your audience. To get more personalized results, consider segmenting your event’s audience based on shared characteristics such as age, donor level, years of attendance, etc.
- Use A/B testing. Test various survey formats to see which event attendees prefer and boost response rate.
Ultimately, the best feedback surveys function to boost donor engagement because they’re convenient and relevant.
2. Feedback Cards
You don’t have to wait until your event is over to capture insights from attendees. Collect feedback during the event with feedback cards. Attendees provide their reactions and suggestions while they’re still fresh in their minds, improving the likelihood that they’ll provide useful feedback. Feedback cards can be used at any type of event, whether it’s in-person or virtual.
Feedback cards can come in a variety of formats. They can be physical cards for participants to handwrite their responses or they can be digital. For instance, if you’re hosting a charity golf tournament, you might place pencils and a stack of cards on each table at the post-round banquet or include a pencil and card in each golfer's swag bag. Alternatively, you could include a QR code on each table, in silent auction baskets, or on golf carts that links to a feedback form. If you’re hosting a webinar or virtual conference, you could use the platform’s poll feature or invite attendees to share feedback in the chat.
No matter what format you choose, aim to make the feedback cards should be even more concise than your post-event feedback surveys to keep attendees focused on the event itself. You might also build a few minutes into the event’s agenda to allow participants time to complete them.
3. Digital Channels
Digital channels provide a unique opportunity for nonprofits to collect feedback while also engaging donors. Your organization likely already leverages digital channels to spread the word about your cause, drive donations, and promote events. You can get even more mileage out of digital channels by using them to garner feedback in an easy and accessible way.
Consider these strategies for using various digital channels:
- Social Media. There are a number of ways to leverage social media to collect feedback. Many platforms, such as Instagram, offer “stories,” which are posts that disappear after 24 hours. These stories can be customized to add polls, quizzes, and short-answer prompts. For event-specific feedback, you might create a unique hashtag for your followers to post public feedback or ask for attendees to send you a direct message with their feedback.
- Blogs. Your nonprofit’s blog is a popular resource for your supporters to learn more about your organization and read stories about your impact. You could include links to feedback pages (both event-specific and general) across relevant blog posts.
- Event Website. Consider adding a feedback form or a link to a feedback form to your event-specific website and/or to any pages on your organization’s website that relate to the event you’re collecting feedback about and invite participants to share their thoughts.
4. Personal Conversations
If you’re looking for more in-depth insights into your event, personal conversations are the best way to collect them. Whether you gather groups of attendees together for informal conversations after the event or chat with folks during the event, these types of conversations are chances to drill down for more feedback.
It’s important to note that the feedback collected from conversations is much more qualitative than the quantitative data provided by standardized surveys and may take more time to collect. That being said, your supporters may appreciate being asked to share their ideas this way.
Continuing with the charity golf tournament example, you might chat with hole sponsors about their signage to see if they were satisfied with their quality and the exposure they received for their investment, as well as what it would take for them to move to a higher level of sponsorship the following year. These types of conversations open doors for increased support in the future.
Tap into your event’s planning committee, board of directors, staff, and volunteers to make phone calls or visit some attendees and sponsors following the event to share the workload. You might also assign a handful of people to chat with people towards the end of the event to ask them for their feedback.
Next Steps
Once you’ve collected feedback from event participants, think of ways you can acknowledge their time and dedication by thanking them or even providing a small token of appreciation for their time.
Collecting feedback is a crucial part of donor stewardship. By consciously improving your feedback-collection methods, you can improve supporter relationships and secure a great turnout—and fundraising outcome—for future events.
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