Introduction to evaluations

This article is for training companies and trainers.

Collecting feedback is an extremely important activity in any training business, as it allows you to improve your services and learning experience on a regular basis (of course, if you work on the received feedback 😉). At the same time, the process may be tedious and time-consuming, especially with online events. It consists of several steps, in most cases separated from each other via different tools. 

Our approach strives to replace these tools with just one, removing the necessity to move personal data of attendees from one place to another, reducing the number of potential human errors like misspelling or mistyping an attendee's name, and significantly decreasing the time for managing feedback. 

Let's review the different phases of feedback collection, and how Workshop Butler helps you with them. Below you'll find the links to other parts of the documentation describing each part in detail.

Decide what questions to ask

There is no size that fits all. That's why you have full freedom of customising evaluation forms for your events in Workshop Butler: creating and rearranging sections and fields of multiple types, from open-ended questions to lists and ratings. 

It usually makes no sense to change the feedback forms for every event - this approach prevents you from noticing patterns and seeing if attendees report the same issues over and over again. To handle that correctly, you can create different evaluation forms for different groups of events, based on a number of parameters. 

Ask in your attendees’ language

As many of our customers give training in two and more languages, it's easy to have your evaluation forms in several languages, for example, in English and German, or French and Spanish. Based on the language of your event, Workshop Butler selects and shows to your attendees a correctly translated evaluation form. 

Request feedback

When a workshop is over, you need to send out evaluation forms to attendees. In most cases, training managers use email applications for that with the form which also includes fields like name and/or email of the attendee, even though the attendees already provided them. 

With Workshop Butler, you don't need most of that. 

First, you can either automate the process of sending out evaluation requests or send them manually with a couple of clicks. In both cases, each attendee gets a personalized fully customisable request from your email domain. 

Second, each attendee gets a unique link to their own evaluation form. They don't need to input their personal data one more time, you don't need to combine the data from different sources.

Evaluations submitted by attendees will be automatically approved by the system if you have the corresponding option activated in the Account Settings. If you haven't enabled this option, you can approve each evaluation manually.

After an evaluation has been approved, attendees receive a post-event email thanking them for their feedback and for participation. If you plan to distribute certificates for this event, they will also be attached to the post-event message.

Use evaluations for promotion

WSB has several ways to promote trainers using evaluations.

Sharing posts on social media

After an attendee submits their evaluation, WSB offers them to share their feedback on social media and shows the preview of the post. It contains the attendee's name, job title, event’s title, and the text of the review from one of the obligatory fields - Share your overall impression. This review can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Adding event rating to a trainer’s rating

Another obligatory field in evaluation forms is Rate your overall experience. WSB uses the answers to this question to calculate event ratings for trainers. This rating is displayed on their profile and can be shown on websites that have been integrated with WSB. 

Creating testimonials

Any approved evaluation can be turned into a testimonial to show on websites. For this, WSB takes the same field that is used for social sharing. When filling in the form, attendees will need to give their consent so that trainers could use their feedback as a testimonial.

Important note: Consent checkmark for turning a review into a testimonial is automatically included into any form, except for Management 3.0 and Collaboration Superpowers events,  due to the specificity of forms they are using.