IN THE NEWS
Nobody has solved event feedback. Here’s why, and what’s finally changing.
Why surveys keep failing
The standard post-event survey gives you a five-point rating scale, a handful of closed questions, and maybe a free-text box. Most people leave the free-text box blank. The ones who don’t are disproportionately at the extremes: either thrilled or annoyed.
I think of this as the J-curve of survey responses. You hear from the
edges. The middle, where most of your audience actually sits, stays quiet. So you end up with data that confirms what you already believed and misses the more interesting, more nuanced reality.
There’s a politeness factor too, especially in professional settings. People are more honest in conversation than in writing. You can hear hesitation when someone speaks. You can catch the thing they almost said. A survey captures the polished, safe version.
Teams invest real hours building survey instruments and reporting dashboards. The output rarely changes what happens at the next event.
Feedback that lives in a silo
Even when teams do manage to collect useful qualitative data, there’s a second problem waiting. It sits in isolation from everything else.
It doesn’t connect to attribution. It doesn’t feed into pipeline reporting. Nobody can tell you whether the people who loved your keynote were the same people who booked a meeting with sales three weeks later. Insights get presented at a debrief, acknowledged, filed. Then the machine moves on to the next event.
This mirrors a broader failure in marketing measurement. Research by IAB shows that up to 75% of marketing leaders consider their attribution models underperforming. Fewer than 10% of organizations say they understand their customers’ journey behavior very well, according to Alterian and CX Network. Everything else is inference and assumption.
Events suffer from this more than most channels. A good event’s value is relational. A conversation that shifts someone’s thinking. An objection addressed in person. A prospect who arrives sceptical and leaves curious. Almost nothing about that shows up cleanly in a multi-touch attribution model. So events get undervalued, budgets get questioned, and the cycle repeats.