Missed Opportunities Within Your Event Strategy — Capturing Peer Driven Data To Make Better Decisions.

8 min readMay 24, 2017

At the Kiwi Landing Pad we run on average 60 events a year in a strategy that encompasses both online and offline formats. From running over 200 events for the last 3 years I’ve learnt a thing or too about how to automate these processes and make them successful, what the true DNA of ‘good’ events are and how they feed into a wider community or marketing strategy.

Over the last 3 years we have really honed our skills to collect the right sort of information so that a we could take a lot of the guess work out of ‘what really matters’ and also are able to check the sentiment of our community on a regular basis as well as their capability and aptitude in certain areas. If you asked yourself right now: ‘Do I know what my customers want from me as a business, or what they need to make themselves more successful.’ — Can you honestly say that you know the answer?

What I’ve noticed from the many companies that I work with at the Kiwi Landing Pad and from being quite obsessed with our own data to make better decisions for our community as a result, I realised that there is a huge missed opportunity for companies on their event sign up forms and post event surveys. An opportunity that I encourage you to capitalise on for the benefit of both your business and your customer/community.

Adding some additional field to your registrations and surveys can open up and entirely new world of information that can for example: Help you form new product features and decisions, up-sell or cross-sell and provide insight and ideas for your content strategy, increase customer loyalty and community engagement.

I just signed up for an event that asked me for my name, email, role and company. What if they thought about what I might want to get out of the event, what I’m looking to learn.

Optimising Event Registrations

While you don’t want to scare people off with asking for HEAPS of information (although I ask for heaps and get away with it!) I would encourage adding a few fields which give you a little more insight into what your attendees want, you might be surprised what sort of insight you might be able to gleam. And whats more, if people are taking the time to attend your event, they are warm, they already want something, you have there attention, it might be useful for them — that is super useful for you if you capture the moment!

For my event registrations I ask people:

What they want to get out of the session. (I also ask them to be specific and provide some examples of what specific looks like) 80% if people give a decent answer.
I ask them if they want to receive updates on specific information relevant to a specific community centred around Sales, Marketing and Product Management.
I ask them if they want to opt into the community to interact with other like minds, founders and attendees. (This allows me permission to formally make introductions and add them to our Sales & Marketing Jam community group).
I ask for there company stage
Normal stuff: Name, Email, Gender, Twitter Handle, Job Title, Company & Website.

This process takes people 5–10 minutes to fill out, most people don’t mind as they understand exactly what we are trying to do, which is help them and by providing this information they know that they are more likely to get the desired positive result for themselves.

Currently we have 1,000 answers to the simple question of ‘what do you want to get out of the session’ if you count for duplicates in team tickets, and dumb answers, you can account for at least 600 decent answers, that is A LOT of information to play with for your specific business.

Optimising Post Event Surveys

Surveys are my favourite thing! An opportunity to engage with my community and learn more about them, learn about what they learnt, what we can improve on, but also what they need as a business to grow and potentially what I can help them with. You may need to extrapolate the ideas out for your own business and figure out what the right make up of this looks like depending on if you are selling a product/service, but at the end of the day — you all have users — which is your community, and they come to you for a reason, go deep with them, it’ll make you both more successful and loyal if you nail it.

For my post event surveys I ask people: Big Events (half/full day)

**2 minutes

What were your top three take aways from the event? (Hello content strategy, people have just told you what was top of mind post event, write about it and send it to them).
What resources and topics do you want access to or do you need to grow your business faster over the next 6 months? (What’s next, this implies you’ll be in touch, you want to help, and they are telling you exactly what they ‘might need’ to achieve this).
Since our event, what is your encore question for us or our speakers? (Invites further discussion for a opportunity to answer an unanswered question or unarticulated need at the time of the event)
Rate our speakers — where they valuable or not? Tell us why? (People provide you with further insight on what they learnt, and what types of people they like learning from eg: logical or story tellers)
Feedback — How do we make this event better or what did you love?
Tell us something about yourself or business that we don’t know (people love talking about themselves, and look forward to sharing there quirks. If you are growing a community, linking people on the common ground of quirks is powerful).
How likely is it that you would recommend our event to a friend or colleague? (Your NPS question).
Amazing experience? Leave a testimonial (Your opportunity to learn how to message in the language of your community).

This is a lot of questions, I’ll admit that. But we get so many great answers. People fill out our surveys on the basis knowing that we will deliver what they have asked for the most part. We’ll email them, connect them or keep delivering relevant content.

Every Sales & Marketing Jam we have on average 250–300 attendees, 25% of attendees fill out our survey and over 60% of those people provide a testimonial. Think about everything we know about our community and how helpful we can be. Pure insights just because we thought to ask, listen and then more importantly — execute.

For my post event surveys I ask people: Small Events (60 minutes)

**90 seconds to fill out.

Name, Business, Role
Rate your overall experience (scale — 1–6 — Very Unsatisfied — Very Satisfied).
What were your top three take aways from the event? (Hello content strategy, people have just told you what was top of mind post event, write about it and send it to them).
What resources and topics do you want access to or do you need to grow your business faster? (What’s next, this implies you’ll be in touch, you want to help, and they are telling you exactly what they ‘might need’ to achieve this).
How likely is it that you would recommend our event to a friend or colleague? (Your NPS question).

It’s important to tell people how long something will take, they are more likely to either do it or not. These questions give you access to both a future content stream, provide insight on where people are currently at in there businesses, and provide further invitation for you to help them solve there problems, I can go back to any of my 4,000 people in my community and directly email them with a link to a blog that I have written for them based on the fact that they asked for it — imagine yourself receiving that, does it feel like I care about your learning and growth? Indeed — what’s more it’s authentic.

Now important to note — I ask two satisfaction questions for a reason that is largely cultural. Kiwis, I find will find an event really useful and amazing, they’ll give you glowing feedback, but then give you a 7 for NPS which to me does not make sense, and I think it comes down to that cultural thing of ‘no body is perfect, I don’t specifically have anything bad to say about the event but won’t give you a 10.’ I take both numbers into account to figure out if we are on the right track and delivering a positive experience, or if in fact we need to improve both numbers offer further insight into the true sentiment that the person feels.

I would encourage you to think about exactly what your community/customer/audience might be interested in and try some experiments. I’ve been iterating my surveys for 3 years.

Using Data To Build Communities — Connecting People Over Common Ground.

One of the things I am really excited about at the Kiwi Landing Pad now that we have all of this information is to actually go back through all of the answers we have from: 30+ surveys with over 600+ responses and thousands of registrations — and see how we can ensure we have provided the information and knowledge that people asked for, but actually take that one step further and see who we can connect on common ground of business stage, interest, geography and even down to personal quirks.

Building a Capability Model That Scales — Initiation to Optimisation

This afternoon I did a webinar with Xero’s founder & CEO Rod Drury. He mentioned my process for webinars/events during the session, afterwards I showed him the data we capture post event and how we measure success. He gave me the insight that a lot of what I was doing was actually a framework that he learnt at University — a Capability Maturity Model.

So when are you are thinking about building out your events strategy, I would encourage you to come up with something that you might think will work, add in a few extra questions in registration, and ALWAYS do a post event survey, even if you only get a few responses, it’s more information then you had before. Keep up the consistency on both the events and process, then go through this model of experimenting with a new idea or concept, then manage it, define it, automate it then optimise it. We are very much in the optimisation stage, it took us 18 months to get there.

Summary

Are you missing opportunities in your event strategy? And can you use your own community and customer insights to make more informed decisions? While I’m not an expert on form design, I’m interested in experimenting and sharing what has worked for me and us at the Kiwi Landing Pad. I have been blown away by our communities willingness to share with us, which in turn has made me much more useful for them as a tool and resource for each of there businesses. Now I can go ahead and solve problems for them, and find answers and solutions based on what they have asked for, and also connect them with like minds over the common ground simply by knowing who they are and what they are about. This is very much the power of combining communities and data.