At what point in the seminar should I gather feedback from participants?

When is the best time to gather attendee feedback and how often they should be asked can’t be said exactly? There are several ways and times to ask for feedback from your event attendees.

Option 1: After the event

One of the most common times to gather seminar feedback from participants is either immediately after the event is over or a few days later.

This is because after the event, participants have a finalized opinion of the content taught and the environment found. The event visitors could also get a clear picture of the course of the event (structured or chaotic).

If the survey is only sent out to the participants a few days later, after the end of the course, some of these participants have probably already been able to gain initial experience with the content they learned. This way you might get more meaningful answers to your questions.

The disadvantage of this option is that if you ask for feedback directly after the seminar, many participants may not feel like answering a questionnaire now, or if the survey takes place a few days later, the participants may already be so far away that the participation rate will probably be low.

In addition, impressions made on the participant during the event may no longer be present at a later point in time.

Option 2: Before the last program item

Have you ever thought about conducting the seminar survey before the start of the last program item?

If you schedule the survey before the last program point, you can be sure that all participants are still present. Also, you will have the desired attention from all participants unless you have overrun the seminar by a considerable amount of time.

With this option, you will probably achieve the highest participation rate with only one survey used for the seminar.

Furthermore, with this option, you can still share the results directly with the seminar participants. For example, if you have asked about satisfaction, this would be a good starting point to discuss the positives and negatives during the seminar.

The disadvantage would be that if you have taught practical tasks, these could not yet be implemented at this point and you cannot yet obtain feedback on them. However, you can still send out a separate survey on practical implementation areas a few days later.

Option 3: During the seminar

Another way to get valuable feedback from seminar participants would be after each break or topic block.

This method has the great advantage that you can use several short questionnaires that specifically address the individual topic blocks of the seminar.

With the shortness of the questionnaire, you increase the motivation of the seminar visitors, because the questionnaires are very short and can be answered quickly. This also increases the quality of the answers, because the fresh impressions are directly converted into feedback.

In addition, with this option, you will probably receive feedback on your seminar from every participant.

Option 4: During and after the seminar

If you use online seminar surveys with a survey tool like HeyForm, you have a flexible tool at hand to collect feedback from your event participants multiple times at any point in time.

Thus you can also combine the collection of feedback. Topic-relevant feedback directly in the seminar, and general feedback after the seminar.

Conclusion

Therefore, we recommend that you conduct several short seminar surveys during the seminar and supplement them with a longer survey a few days later. Then compare the results with each other. You will find that this method provides you with more valuable information from the feedback.