How to get visitor feedback online to improve what you do
1. Introduction
The digital sphere offers endless possibilities for finding out information about those you interact with, so much so that being offered numerous choices and options can seem like a taunting place to be. Stats are everywhere – from Facebook reporting to the multi-faceted Google Analytics – all of which can be so useful but sometimes overwhelming.
If you want depth of knowledge or too find out something more specific, it’s a good idea to go your own way. The good news is that beginning to obtain visitor feedback through your online platforms is easy – once you’ve chosen what to do and ask – and what’s better is that there are multiple ways to do it, and most it it you can do for free or little cost.
This will reap lots of benefits for you. It will give you the opportunity to get to know your digital audiences in the same way that you might intuitively know your audiences who visit or attend. You can use the information you gather here to help you build audience segments (How can I use segmentation to understand my audiences?, or to find out what might drive your online audiences to visit or to engage more, to help understand people’s experiences of your organisation or help you write compelling funding applications and build cases for support.
No need to get in a fluster over feedback; with this easy, practical guide you will be well on your way to adding this to your portfolio of tools to build a more sustainable, robust organisation, by getting to know your audiences better.
2. What do you want to know?
The most difficult part of this is actually deciding ‘What do I want to know?’, and also ‘Who do I want to find it out from?’. Use your opportunities to get feedback wisely – audiences (online or offline) don’t want to be bombarded all the time with endless questionnaires or pieces of research. Try not to have a knee-jerk reaction to needing to find out something from your audiences. If you need to know something specific, hang back if you can until you can build it into something more substantial so that you’re not going out to the same group of people too frequently to gather information.
Another consideration is the benefits of having an always-on approach to feedback, vs a one-off piece of research. For example you might want everyone who has visited your site to have the opportunity to fill in a visitor feedback survey online after they’ve been, or introduce a group of advocates that you can run quarterly online focus groups with. In both these cases you will need to assess the results more frequently and act on them.
You should have a ‘big question’ in mind – what’s your aim of this feedback. Is it to improve your visitor experience? Is it to define your organisation’s future? Is it to build your audience engagement through better understanding of their experiences?
And of course it’s a good idea to have a mix of quantitative (hard facts, numbers, multiple choice responses) and qualitative (opportunity to write prose or free text, or speak freely and talk) feedback in place. Quantitative feedback will give you a good solid base to help you make decisions, whereas qualitative feedback can you help you build a richer picture of someone’s thoughts and is often where those lightbulb moments lie.
Here are some quantitative things you may like to know –
- Demographics: herein lies some essentials for example rough age range, location, family make-up etc. It may also help you define who you want to find out information from – for example you may only want to find out information from people that live within your region.
- Interests: a tick list of things relevant to your organisation, or wider if you feel it’s relevant to how you’re making decisions.
- Likeliness to do something: ‘How likely are you to visit within the next – one month; 2–3 months; 4–6 months; 6+ months’, or ‘how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?’
- Habits: ‘Have you visited before?’, ‘How often do you visit heritage attractions?’.
- Referrals: ‘How did you hear about us?’, accompanied by a tick list plus ‘other’ option.
- Statements: things that you can put on a scale of 1–5 of Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.
And here are some qualitative things you may like to open discussion to:
- Experiences: ‘How did this make you feel?’, ‘How would you describe your overall experience?’, ‘What was your reaction to the exhibition?’, ‘What was your favourite thing?’, ‘What was you least favourite thing?’
- Perception: ‘How would you describe the organisation in just a few words?’, ‘What makes us different to other places you might have been to’
- The future: ‘If you were to come again, what would you change?’, ‘Was there anything missing from your day out?’
3. Who do you want to ask?
Deciding who you would like to ask for feedback from will help you choose what channels you need to communicate it through.
If you’re looking for feedback from those who have visited:
- Collect email addresses on site or as part of a booking process (better still to build up a mailing list of those who have been and are interested) and send them an email with a link to a questionnaire; or request to participate in feedback sessions
- Display QR code posters on site with a link to your feedback form and a call to action, or request to participate in feedback sessions
If you’re looking for opinions from those with whom you have had a digital engagement:
- Post the request on your website, either as a button or story on your homepage
- Post about it on your social media channels with a call to action and a with a compelling request for people’s help in defining the organisation’s future, and why you’re doing it
4. How: forms and questionnaires
One of the easiest ways to gather feedback is on a feedback form. They’re easy to build, you can do them in sections so it doesn’t feel like one long questionnaire, and if you want to go that next level you can even alter what questions somebody is asked next based on their previous responses. You can ask all of your quantitative and qualitative questions this way.
Free, and easy to use, Google Forms are the entry level of feedback forms. They’re presented simply, give you options for multiple choice, tick boxes, option buttons, numeric entries, pre-defined entries, short text and longer text responses. As Google Forms gathers your responses it will show you pie charts and graphs too so you can get a quick overview of some of the quantitative information.
Do you already use Mailchimp? Many heritage organisations do as it offers some free email platform capabilities, as well as low cost options, and it has a built in survey tool too. The advantage of this is that Mailchimp is likely storing your email data already. It can do all of those things listed that Google can, plus it can automatically send a survey to those that have joined your mailing list. You can email a group of respondents to a question too.
And then there’s SurveyMonkey – whilst it doesn’t have the email integration that Mailchimp does, it can offer you greater flexibility in how your questionnaires and feedback forms are structured. This, in my experience, tends to be the preferred available-to-all platform that research organisations have asked me to use when working in partnership with them. However, to use these tools there is a cost but it’s not expensive for the depth of feedback you will get in return.
Finally, depending on what your website CMS (Content Management System) is, you could build one directly into your website using a plugin. In my opinion, this is fine for snappy quick feedback where you may only want to ask a brief couple of questions, or to ask people if they’d like to join a mailing list. For everything else I’d use a specifically-designed tool like those listed above.
Things to bear in mind:
- Structure your survey so it makes sense to the person filling it in – ask basic/demographic questions first, groups other questions by a part of your organisation or subject area you want feedback on (such as exhibitions, on site facilities, general awareness etc).
- Don’t ask leading questions: get a critical friend to read through your questions before you send out or open up your questionnaire. If you find some questions are unavoidably leading, turn them into statements instead with a sliding scale of Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.
- Don’t chop and change the format of responses you want. If in one part of the survey you ask for Strongly Agree / Agree / Neither Agree nor Disagree / Disagree / Strongly Disagree, then don’t add a scale of 1–10 somewhere else. Keep the formats within a similar a range as possible so the person filling it in can navigate it easily.
- If you’re looking to get feedback through your website, you could try a pop up. These are a bit marmite in the industry – some love them, some hate them. Either way they certainly put the ask front and centre, and can be a way to build your mailing list.
5. How: focus groups and audience circles
Focus groups and audience circles are great for when you need to take your depth of understanding to a higher level. These groups should be aimed at getting content-rich, qualitative feedback from your audiences that can be used to build or help define strategic objectives.
First, recruit. Think about what you want to know who you want to be in the sessions. You can recruit people for a focus group in the same ways that you would invite them to take part in a questionnaire, or even off the back of a questionnaire depending on how they responded. You can aim to have a broad mix of people if you want a wide-ranging representation of how audiences view your organisation and its activities, or you might have a specific target group in mind. Finally, think carefully about how many people you’d like in your group, especially in an online context. Even with 10 to 15 people you will likely need to use breakout spaces at some point. Better to run multiple sessions with smaller numbers.
You may also need to incentivise participants to join as focus groups can be quite a time-intensive activity. You could simply pay people, or offer vouchers (note that it’s best practice to offer vouchers to something like Amazon or a high street brand, not for your own organisation as that will remove a group of participants available to you). Even in a charitable context, you need to give people something back for their time. You will not recruit the best group of people if you need to rely on good will.
Second, arrange. In this post-covid world, we are all used to communicating in ways we might not have before. Most people will have used Zoom, Google Meets or Microsoft Teams at some point, whether for a working-from-home meeting or for those Sunday night family quizzes we all did. Don’t let the barrier of trying to get a focus group together in person get in the way – you could have the opportunity to converse with people all over the world if that’s what your organisation needed.
Third, design. Think about the questions you want to ask. Focus groups may need shorter, easier to answer questions to start a session off with to warm everyone up. Do you need to make a small presentation to begin to set the scene? Then once everyone’s warmed up you should aim to ask open ended questions and pose open-ended statements to stimulate conversation. You can also do scenario testing, where you present alternative ways that something may come about to gauge how a group feels about the possibilities.
Fourth, facilitate. The hardest part about running a focus group is facilitating the session, you may even wish to ask someone who is trained in running groups like this to do it for you. In a physical space you might use a flip chart, post-it notes, even props. You can use online tools such as a Mural board to do much of that online (prepare the boards in advance), and everyone can have it on screen too to pop their own post-it notes or comments on.
Some of the meeting platforms have tools that you can add-on to help facilitate your session, such as votes and polls. And make sure you record the session (having told everyone there you are doing so!) so you can listen back again.
Fifth, sum up and thank. Be sure to sum-up your session at the end, and thank everyone for attending.
6. How: fun feedback
Ok so everything so far has been quite in-depth, with good reason. But there are surely some fun ways of getting feedback, right?
Absolutely, but they’re best used for a quick feedback hit on something that’s fairly inconsequential. This is where social media can come in to this more prominently. Either way, you’re building a relationship with your online audience and asking someone to engage in a more active way which can only be a good thing.
- On Instagram, you can … add votes to your stories, do a quiz, ask questions which people can instantly respond to, add a slider for how much someone likes something.
- On Twitter, you can … do a poll and ask multiple choice questions with a set time limit on them.
- On Facebook, you can … create a post and ask for comments (buyer beware, free text responses can illicit unexpectedly strong views on something you may feel is not a big deal).
- On your website, you can … add a plugin that has a simple smiley face response of happy / ok / sad to assess a certain page or a process.
I’m not going to pretend that any of this will make a compelling argument for a business plan. But get creative because some of these tools could be really useful to you, and can have really high levels of participation because they’re easy.
7. Assess and evaluate
Once you’ve collated your feedback, your final step is to assess and evaluate the data. The possibilities are far too endless for me to go into here. Just a couple of top tips:
- Remember what your big question was, what did you want to know in the first place – have you answered if?
- Present the information in a way that answers the question, not necessarily in the same way that Google Forms or other such platforms show the information by default. You may need to play around with the data here.
- By doing any of this, you’re creating a pool of engaged, active participants who now have a deeper interest in your organisation. Let them know the outcomes and what you’re going to do that they helped pave the way on. Keep them engaged and on board with what you want to achieve.
- Finally, keep at it – feedback and research should be an ongoing process really to ensure you are meeting your strategic objectives, and that people understand your organisation.
8. Conclusion
Gaining research through your audiences online is such an approachable, easy-to-adopt strategic piece of work you can do. Don’t underestimate the impact that it could have on how you determine what your organisation’s next steps are, and how you can improve.
People are generally happy to offer charities and heritage organisations time with their thoughts – take advantage of people’s ‘thought philanthropy’ and be sure to keep your organisation on track. With all these tools above, there’s really no reason not to.
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Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence
Please attribute as: "How to get visitor feedback online to improve what you do (2022) by Edward Appleyard supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 4.0
