Do you know what your participants think about the last conference you organized?
Do you have any idea about their expectations?
Moreover, how will you change your setup in the future to attract more participants?

There is more and more competition between different conferences and meetings. Often, potential participants have budgets that they can use for increasingly many upcoming events. Thus, for an organizer of a conference or convention, it has become very important that you have an as attractive as possible program. In addition, the participants have significantly higher expectations of the events and their organizers.
There are many ways to get feedback and to find out what the participants are thinking.
You can make phone calls, or personal interviews. That will give you the personal touch and you will receive a lot of information between the lines. By talking directly to the people, you can also let them elaborate if their answers are ambiguous. However, this method not only costs you a lot of money, but also much time. Therefore, you cannot really do it with a large number of participants.
The traditional way is to send out paper forms and questionnaires. The problem with these is that you do not have any direct contact. Incomplete forms, badly written text and impossible answers will make analysis difficult. All forms usually have to be processed manually, especially if you have many fields with free text. You have also no control about the rate of persons, which give you a feedback.

   
A more elegant version is conducting online surveys. Online web-based questionnaires allow you to check the answers as they are given. This immediate feedback allows reducing answers that do not make sense. (Note that open text answers still cannot be checked that easily.) The results are immediately available, even before all answers have been given. It is also possible to send out e-mail reminders to all persons that have not filled out the form yet. Therefore, distribution of an online survey is cheap and feedback and analysis are available quickly. By using web-based surveys and e-mails, you are in more personal contact than with an anonymous paper form. While it is certainly less personal than physical interviews, it is also much less expensive and time consuming.
Online surveys are a modern and efficient method to keep contact with the participants.
Take the opportunity to know more about your participants’ expectations and stay ahead of your competitors by knowing better how you can succeed in the market.
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