Getting Presentation Feedback from Your Audiences?… Don’t Trust the Usual Sources (Part Two)

In Part One of this series, I discussed how to gauge if your audience thought you did a good job when you spoke, or if they are simply being polite.

Another source people use to determine if the audience enjoyed the speech or not is evaluation sheets (or as Alan Weiss calls them “smile sheets”).

While I understand the urge for businesses to use a quantifiable measurement to judge the success or failure of a speech, the evaluation sheet process has become arbitrary. They ask the audience to rate the skills of the presenter on a scale of 1-5, one being the lowest and five being the highest. What does a 1 rating mean? It was the worst presentation you’ve ever seen in your life? What does a 5 rating mean? The speaker should be earning 6-figures just to come in today because they are so fabulous? And – my biggest problem with evaluation sheets – what’s the difference between a 4 and a 5?

The 1-5 scale means something different for every person in the room. Therefore, you don’t know if the audience member gave a 4 because they never give 5’s, because 5’s to them signify perfect performance. Who knows? And then there could be the jerk in the audience who marked a 1 on the sheet even though it had nothing to do with the speech, he just didn’t want to be at the stupid conference that day. Who knows?

Which is why I suggest creating an evaluation sheet with open-ended questions and a few yes/no questions. For example, you will learn much more if you ask “What are the 3 main take-aways you learned from this program?” or “How could today’s presentation been improved?” Force your audience to explain their impressions of the presentation.

You can also ask yes/no questions. For example, “Would you recommend this program to your colleagues? Why or why not?”

Think of how much more valuable feedback you’ll receive from evaluations with these types of questions as opposed to the 1-5 scale which leaves you wondering.