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Getting Feedback From Your Entrants
Congratulations, you have just finished executing your awards program! But planning, organizing, and managing your awards program is a year-round job. It’s time to move past the post-awards gala catharsis and get back to work! So what do you do now?
A Program-wide Assessment
After your awards cycle is over, you must complete a program-wide assessment. A comprehensive evaluation of your awards program will provide you with key metrics for determining the success of your awards cycle. No awards program is perfect, and every year you should be able to pinpoint ways to improve. But where do you start? First, let’s look into getting feedback from your entrants.
Why?
Entrants can give you a wealth of information about your program that no one else can. After all, they’ve been through every stage of it. But what kind of information should you be gathering? It’s easy to find out the number of entrants you had this year, but numbers can’t give you the whole story of:
• Why you have new entrants
• Why some of your past entrants applied again this year
• Why some of your past entrants did not return
Without feedback from your entrants, you can’t determine which aspects of your program appealed to your entrants or which parts deterred possible ones. Getting these qualitative metrics from your entrants will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your program. It can also reveal whether there is a gap in understanding about your program between you and your entrants.
For example, you can determine what entrants valued most about your awards. Were they impressed by the judging? Was the submission process convenient enough for them? Were they kept adequately informed at each stage of the awards cycle? Was the eligibility criteria explained clearly enough?
Remember, your entrants are the core of your entire awards program. Without them, there would be no program. As such, their feedback is critical to identify your awards program’s strengths and weaknesses.
How Do I Reach Out To Entrants?
Gathering this valuable feedback sounds more tedious and complicated than it actually is. To collect feedback, send out targeted surveys to the three different groups of entrants:
• Past Entrants – Entrants did not apply this year, but who applied in the past
• Returning Entrants – Entrants who applied both before and during this current awards cycle
• New Entrants – Entrants who have never applied to your program before
The optimal time for sending out the surveys is right after the Call for Entry deadline. By this time, the entrants have your awards program fresh on their minds. By categorizing entrants and sending them each targeted surveys, you can learn a lot about your entrants. Each survey will show you a different focus of the entrants experience that you can use to improve the process for next year.
Want to learn more about reaching out to your entrants? Then, check out our guide (and free survey templates!).
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