Feedback for Conference Presenters

After presenting at the recent Quarterly Technology Briefing in London, Manchester and Hamburg I had a very good question from one of my colleagues about what feedback I found most valuable.

Our feedback forms were quite short with two quantitative questions (out of a 1-5 scale), and three or four free text questions. Although the quantitative questions gave me a good indication of general feedback from the audience, it is not specific enough for me to really understand what things to do more of, or things to do less of. It reminds me of a traffic light system some conferences used (red, yellow, green) for evaluating conference presenters. Fun, quick, but entirely useless to know why people put numbers down.

Although the free text answers to feedback forms take more time to read, the feedback is much more helpful, particularly around getting an understanding of where expectations for a session matched or didn’t match, and useful suggestions or ideas to focus more on. I can take this feedback and actually do something about it for a different presentation.

For conference organisers, or if you’re putting feedback forms together for your own workshop, please don’t leave feedback as a binary, or based solely on numbers. Although there are advantages to getting quicker to an evaluation, you don’t really know why people rated something well or not well. Ask open ended questions and provide these to speakers unedited and raw.

I think if conferences really wanted speakers to get better as well, I think having some peer presenters sit in a session and provide targeted feedback would be even better. I could imagine something like this could focus solely on the mechanics and/or execution of the presentation and give timely, helpful feedback to improve the session and the presenter.