FeedbackLabs is a collection of like-minded organizations committed to the belief that everyday people should be the primary drivers of the policies and programs that affect them. The organization’s annual Feedback Summits bring ‘feedback enthusiasts’ together to discuss issues within the emerging feedback movement. These conference-style summits provide attendees with multiple speakers and sessions and are often multi-day events.
Frontline worked with FeedbackLabs and Keystone Accountability (a non-profit that helps organizations understand and improve their feedback practices) during the inaugural London Feedback Summit held in November 2016. The event organizers used Frontline to collect and analyze survey responses and opinion data in real-time during for each session throughout the summit.
Each session speaker had the ability to poll or survey their session attendees using SMS. Since there were many sessions occurring simultaneously throughout the day, each session was assigned a unique keyword before the summit began. The session attendees were instructed to include the session-specific keyword in their response. Session speakers also informed Frontline the questions they intended to ask and the response type they expected, and most of the session speakers chose either multiple choice or open response style questions.
On the day of the Summit, each session’s responses were automatically tallied in real-time. This allowed each speaker and event organizers to quickly and easily analyze session feedback and also plan discussions around the feedback later that day. For multiple-choice based feedback, event organizers relied on Frontline’s dynamic chart capabilities to review instantly and also to export the data in a CSV file to recreate in Powerpoint for later sessions. Open response feedback was displayed with a word cloud within the Frontline workspace but was also exported to simply be read and shared.
The well-attended sessions saw high participant engagement with the SMS feedback format - some sessions boasted 100% response rate. At least 80% of all event attendees participated in at least one survey or activity.