Today, the whole community building industry is evolving very fast. And a whole ecosystem is being built where there is a strong culture of people providing value to each other. And the preferred mode for doing the same is by hosting community events. Community builders learn and collaborate with each other through these events by talking about topics that they feel are important. And they also spend time on planning a community event checklist for the same.

These learnings that people share through these community events are accumulated from their own experiences. And then they try to present those learnings to everyone by hosting these community events. In these community events, the audiences are also allowed to exchange learnings on the same topic.

All the community builders have a very clear event plan. At least in terms of how many events they are going to do every week, alternate week, or every month. But, what we've seen is that community builders often don't have a very detailed plan. This includes things like what to do before the event? What to do during the event? And what to do after the event?

So, for that, you can actually have a community event checklist that you can maintain to do different things. But, as part of our research, we got to know that it's underrated what people do after hosting an event. Trust us, there is so much to do after hosting a community event. And there is so much that you can do.

And on that note, if you are looking for a platform where you can host private & live events, then check out LikeMinds right away! Our platform comes with inbuilt features that make it easy for everyone to host free as well as paid events.

In this blog, we'll talk about the following:

• The after-event to-do checklist
• Questions to include in the after-event survey
• How to evaluate the success of the event?
• Best practices for gathering event feedback

... And much more!

So, let's begin!

The After-event To-do Checklist

Because there is just so much that needs to be done after the event is over, one of the best ways to ensure that everything has been taken care of is to create a to-do checklist. Here are the things that you would want to have in your after-event to-do checklist:

• Put up a post on LinkedIn about the event along with the screenshot from the event
• Conduct a post-event review by following up on social media
• Send the recording to all the attendees along with a thank you note asking for feedback
• Write a summary or a blog based on the notes taken during the event
• Create a podcast and upload it on various platforms
• Create a highlight reel and post it along with the blog link on various social media platforms
• Email the speakers asking them to like the posts and share them with their audiences as well
• Start planning your next event

Now, this is an example that you can refer to and start planning a community event checklist of your own. These are the after-event actionable. So, one should maintain an Excel file for these actions and also have a timeline on when to execute which step. You can use the sample community event checklist given above to start planning a community event checklist as that will really go a long way.

So, these are a few examples of how you can use the event content and repurpose it for posting on various social media platforms and SEO to increase your reach. You can try similar things for your community as well. So, of course, the basic thing that you need to execute all that is given in the community event checklist above is to definitely record the community events.

And ZOOM allows that with a very basic plan. So, that could be your starting point and there are so many other tools too that can help you record or even do live broadcasts of your community events. You can also create and publish smaller reels of these events on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

But remember that all these platforms have their own formats. So, make sure to use different platform-specific formats to create content out of your community events. Then you can also send a thank you email to everyone who participated. You can send a thank you email to the panelists too if the event is around getting someone who is joining your event as a guest speaker. So, you should definitely try some of these things. 

Also Check Out:

• Tips For Planning Virtual Community Events
• Tools and Formats For Conducting A Virtual Event
• Watch: The Ultimate Virtual Community Event Planning Checklist
• Watch: Tools and Formats for Conducting Virtual Community Events

Questions To Include In The After-event Survey

If you want to conduct an after-event survey, then you need to ensure that it is well thought out and carefully planned. Below are the questions that you can consider asking in your after-event survey to get useful data insights:

• Rate your event experience
• What was their favorite thing about the event?
• Would they recommend your events to their friends?
• How likely are they to attend a similar event in the future?
• Any other recommendation or suggestion

The after-event survey is one of the most important things when it comes to improving your future events. And these are some of the questions that you could ask to make your future events better. Not just this, some of these things can also be used to analyze your Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Now there is also a whole debate around:

• Should you have these subjective questions in your form?
• When should you circulate the feedback form?
• Should you circulate it after the event over an email?
• Or should you share the link of the survey towards the end of the session?
• Which strategy provides better results?
• How to do an after-event survey in the best way?
• And are one-on-one calls better for deeper learnings?

Don't worry!

You'll find answers to all these questions in the blog ahead!

Community Event Checklist: Things To Do After Hosting A Community Event

Evaluating The Success Of The Community Event

Evaluating how good the event was is one of the most important things because that is how you'll know what things you need to improve for your next event. And the best way to measure the success of any community event is by gathering feedback. So feedback form is important to understand how the event has been.

If you have some good feedback about how amazing the event was or how well the speakers spoke, you'd know that you have already delivered to the audience what they were promised. And by asking the attendees to provide feedback, you'll also get to know what all went wrong and what needs to be improved.

It helps a lot. Another major benefit you get through gathering feedback is that the audience develops trust in you. And it helps in growing a community and as it's always said, ""Your community members will be helping you in keeping business, monetarily."" So, you need to feed them with values, in whatever ways possible.

Also Check Out:

• Watch: How To Plan A Virtual Community Event?
• Online Brand Community: Top Hacks For Building A Virtual Brand Community
• Community Building Career: Different Roles And Global Opportunities
• Community Team: How To Build A Volunteer Team For Online Community

Different Ideas For Gathering After Event Feedback

When it comes to gathering feedback, there is no right or wrong way of doing it. Different things work for different communities. So, below is a list of ideas that you can use for gathering feedback for your online community event and see which ones work the best for you!

1. Engage in the last 5 minutes: During the last 5 minutes of the event, try to engage with folks. Try to interact with them again so that the momentum is there. And then share the feedback form there. Gathering feedback during the event is one of the most effective ways of doing it. During that time, the audiences are also in full zest & energy and they are happy to give their feedback about the event if it went well.

So, during the event is something that is very beneficial because people do care about giving feedback during the vent. And especially if the event is a paid one. And after events, the proportion is likely to get reduced.

2. Take feedback anonymously: You can also share the feedback form after the event and take it anonymously as that helps in gathering light and authentic feedback. Then you can evaluate the feedback gathered through the Net Promoter Score and see want went wrong. Along with this, you can also give them the link to join your community.

The most commonly used tools for gathering feedback anonymously are Google Forms, Typeform, and Bitly Forms. Through these forms, you can also gather feedback on the value that people are getting out of the events and what kind of events will they like to attend in the future. On Typeform, you can use the rating scale option to gather this feedback as well.

3. Ask for feedback on social media: You can ask people to share photos from the event and give their feedback on social media. This strategy usually works really well on Twitter. Or, you can share the member highlights from the event on LinkedIn & Twitter, and ask the attendees what went wrong publicly.

Don't stop at the event. Try to reach out to probably some of the members who were more engaging in the event. Reach out to them one-on-one on let's say LinkedIn or Instagram. Or whatever channel suits you better. And have conversions with them. This is a great opportunity to build a one-on-one relationship with your members. So, do use that as a way to reach out.

4. Post a thank you note in the community: As a thank you note, put out the post in an informal way in the community. And analyze people's comments and reactions to see how well the event did or what needs to be improved. This idea works in the favor of community builders in a lovely way.

You can also host discussions in your community after the event and gather feedback from those discussions. These different ways of gathering feedback can actually improve engagement within the community too.

5. Take note of the audience turn up: If for an event you expect 50% of the registered audience to show up and that estimation turns out to be right, then use it as a feedback metric going forward. Take out an estimate of the expected audience turn up, and if it keeps increasing with every event, then you know that your events are doing good.

6. Have a feedback giving policy: You can ask the attendees to sign up for the feedback policy as part of registering for the event. And as per this policy, you can ask them to give you video bites on their feedback for the event. You can also give them a lead magnet like an exclusive checklist or cheat list in return for a 30-second video bite.

This way, you'll get a good amount of feedback to evaluate. There are hundreds and thousands of lead magnets available in terms of ebooks, cheat papers, check sheets, and what not? So, you can do that. A small course can also be sold off for the same. So, use lead magnets for even getting feedback sometimes.

7. Use Trustpilot for 2-in-1 benefits: You can use Trustpilot to get 2-in-1 benefits. One is to get feedback and the other is to get a 5-star review. You can share this Trustpilot link with your audience either during the event or once the event is over. And with the link, add a message asking you to give a 5-star review if they liked the event.

And in majority of the cases, audiences go with 5 stars and it helps in Google rankings too!

Ideas For Gathering After Event Feedback

Asking Subjective Questions In The Feedback Form

When it comes to asking subjective questions in the feedback form, there are two things that one needs to take into account. On one hand, the user-generated content (UGC) is being created by forms that people fill. And then there is the other side where one does not want to make the form long to avoid a significant dropout and people not filling it.

In situations like this, you need to understand that hosting events is an art and science at the same time. There is a huge process involved. There are certain limitations of a Google Form & Typeform. These are the dominant tools for use and the perception of feedback is heavily influenced by the structure of these tools.

So, if you step away from these tools and try to identify what your objectives are, certainly you can make a place and a good balance of subjective and objective. Or it can be divided into phases. If you want to push it to a larger cohort, it is better to gather feedback in a very short and crisp way. But if you see that the 10 people who responded very quickly, almost as soon as you had sent the email, then they can be a great fit for your subjective inquiry.

So, subjective and qualitative analysis is very important. But how to take it without compromising the crispness or without making them feel fatigued while giving feedback is the crucial part. Also, Typeform is a paid tool and it has logical reasoning. The tool helps you filter and churn out your prospects.

But, of course, whenever you give choices of answers to a user, rather than going for typing, you'll get a complete graphical analysis if you make use of options like yes and no, checkboxes, rating scale, etc. This way, it will be easy to map out what's the interest of people and it will all get you a proper graphical demographic.

Also, knowing what the audience's taste is about will help you to churn out and get your funnel ready for your prospects. So, if you're looking for quantitative feedback, this is very useful. 

Quick Tips, Tricks, And Hacks

1. Reflect after the event and try to ask yourself what went wrong?

2. Instead of just beginning with critical feedback or thinking, first, celebrate whatever initiative you've taken because that also increases the openness to receiving constructive feedback.

3. Feedback is a great way for generating user-generated content. This content can be used for marketing and as testimonials.

4. Repurposing content, writing a blog, and identifying what medium and what kind of format suits the knowledge that you are generating in the event can take your event a long way.

5. Do not stop connecting with the attendees and provide them with the opportunity to participate by asking for feedback.

6. Take consent for gathering feedback as just hovering around people for feedback in a live event is not the way to go about it.

7. Make the feedback process interesting by making it more interactive and gamifying the experiences.

8. Rewards and recognition is a tangible strategy that assures the attendees that your community is a place for them to be heard and keep coming back again.

And if you want to learn, network, and collaborate with the top community builders from across the country, then join CommunityHood today. At CommunityHood we host live learning events around community building and some of our past guest speakers have been from renowned online communities like The Product Folks, Mudrex, and Stoa School.