Getting attendee feedback seems to be a standard practice in the tradeshow business. Learning how we can do a better job by asking the attendees what they liked and didn’t like, in theory, is suppose to help us improve our events so that more attendees are satisfied and more come back in the future. Yet I’m finding that 99.99% of the feedback is useless to us, either because the attendees simply don’t understand our business (”Make the conference sessions free next time”) or their suggestions are things we know about, yet have no control over (”The WiFi Internet sucked - you need to do a better job of that - you’re a technology conference!”).

Regular readers of my blog know that last one angers me every time - Internet providers at hotels and convention centers simply aren’t up to the task of providing stable wi-fi to 500 modern Internet users in one room at one time. We have meeting after meeting with the providers prior to our events, where we specifically warn them about what they are going to encounter, and yet the Internet goes down or is nearly unusable about 75% the time. And yet we, as the organizer, are blamed for being ill-prepared. Even on the exhibit hall floor, you’d think that paying $1,000 per connection would ensure rock-solid bandwidth - instead it’s a crap shoot - and I’m sick of it.

Anyway, back to the surveys. I’m finding more and more, that most general attendee feedback just isn’t worth the hassle. Feedback like, “It was too cold in the room” followed by the attendee in the same room saying, “Are you guys too cheap to turn on the air-conditioning?” are enough to drive any event organizer mad. Individual opinions simply aren’t consistent enough to make any changes that would please more people, and it’s a waste of our resources to even ask for it. So we won’t be in the future.

Yes that’s right, we’re not doing any general surveys for future events.

What we DO plan on doing, is feedback for individual speakers about their workshops. Even though we know speakers will get feedback ranging from “Terrible speaker” to “Best Speaker at the Expo!”, there are probably a few things the speaker can learn from and improve for the next presentation.

So is it possible that we’ll miss the .01% of the suggestions that might actually be worthwhile because I’m not willing to sift through the 99.99% of the feedback that is worthless? I suppose, but as a small company we have to dedicate our resources to where they are best used, and filtering through all the nonsense to get to that piece of information just doesn’t make sense.