Convene - February 2016

o doubt, it is a struggle.” While Sharon Boyle,
vice president of the Foodservice Sales &
Marketing Association (FSMA), is talking
about her own pains with feedback forms — aka smile
sheets, session evaluations, and attendee surveys —
her challenge is a collective one. Or so the results of
Convene’s recent survey on this standard industry
practice would indicate.

Nearly 200 meeting organizers weighed in on the difficulties feedback forms pose, from crafting the kinds of questions and response choices that will elicit actionable insights, to finding the format (paper or digital), timing (immediately after each session or once the conference concludes), and incentives that will increase participation.

Despite Boyle’s best efforts to appeal to the individual preferences of her attendees — primarily males in their 40s to 60s — by offering session evaluations both on a mobile app “for those that are more progressive” and on paper “for those that have not embraced technology quite yet,” she doesn’t think she’ll get more than a 30- to 40-percent response rate at FSMA’s next conference. And that’s with a $200-prize drawing as the cherry on top.

Even health-care meetings that make receiving
continuing-education credits contingent on filling
out evaluation forms often fall short of a 100-percent
participation mark. “I’m not sure that I have a
particularly good story to tell,” said Theresa Barrett,
Ph.D., CMP, CAE, deputy executive vice president
for the New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians
(NJAFP). “We run a large meeting for first
responders. EMTs and paramedics in New Jersey
are required to have a certain number of CEUs to
maintain their license. When we went to a mobile
app two years ago, we set the system up so that the
only way attendees could obtain their certificate was
to complete the evaluation. At the end of the survey,
they would be taken to the website where they could
download their certificate. While this is a large
conference — we had over 800 attendees this year —
not all are EMTs or paramedics. As of today [the end
The feedback form is such a fixture
in the meetings industry that you would
think it would have been perfected by now.

But Convene’s survey results suggest a tool
that is ripe for redesign. And that’s just
taking into account the number of respon-
dents who expressed frustration. “I’m
always amazed,” one respondent wrote,
“when attendees will share their feedback
— good or bad — with us in person, but
aren’t willing to complete feedback forms,
regardless of the way they are offered to
them. All we want to do is obtain the infor-
mation to improve the conferences and
events for attendees.”
It’s not just conference organizers
who are struggling to make feedback
surveys more participatory and insight-
ful. It’s such a big issue in the workplace-
learning industry, which hinges on the
effectiveness of training sessions, that
Will Thalheimer, Ph.D., founder of
Work-Learning Research, felt compelled
to write a book devoted to the subject.

Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form was published this month.

Given his experience, Thalheimer seemed the ideal subject-matter expert to help us construct our survey questions and responses, and then walk us through the results. Here’s what stood out to him, juxtaposed with respondent comments that we found illuminating.