Cool+creative+efficient way to collect opinions at an event?
February 7, 2018 4:57 PM   Subscribe

Planning a work event where we'll be doing a chocolate tasting and need to collect opinions electronically from about 100 people about what they like. More inside.

I've done this at home parties several times with about 40 people, and I just collected paper scorecards and entered them into Excel. But now we've gotta go corporate. About 100 people (we hope - but who'd say no to free chocolate?) and likely 15-20 chocolates.

* We're going to collect some basic preference info from attendees before the event and assign them an id.

* We need to let attendees choose at least "like", "neutral" or "dislike" for any chocolate they want to rate (no need to collect numeric scores) and we need to enter the scores into a system (say Excel) at the end of the tasting.

* We would like to give their scorecards back to attendees so they can take home a list of the chocolates and their notes/scores, but this is not necessary.

We need to make this as smooth as possible. Electronic options? iPhone survey? Robot kiosk? QR codes? Hand out paper cards with their id printed? Paper next to each sample where a user writes her score on a public list?

All ideas welcome!
posted by VeniceGlass to Society & Culture (10 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Google forms - free, customizable, easy. Attendees can complete on their phones or at kiosks. If people want, they can have a copy of their response emailers to them.
posted by firei at 5:11 PM on February 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


Can you get your hands on a tablet for each sample loaded to a google form for each.
Or you can give each person a card with a space for each sample and they can take a red yellow or green sticker for each sample. At the end you have data about how many/which stickers were taken for each sample.
posted by bleep at 5:19 PM on February 7, 2018


Or if you want to record info about individual opinions give each person a card and have a sheet with all the ids at each station. Ask user to mark the card (if they want) and the sheet.
posted by bleep at 5:41 PM on February 7, 2018


There are meeting tools where, if you have a way to project, you can get results in real time if the attendees all have smartphones and are willing to go to a particular URL. Unfortunately I don’t know what they used at my last conference but try googling live polling.
posted by cabingirl at 6:10 PM on February 7, 2018


cabingirl: Probably Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:46 PM on February 7, 2018


My org uses sli.do for this—sounds like it would do the trick.
posted by stellaluna at 7:13 PM on February 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


As an addition to something digital, it's fun to give people tokens of some sort and have transparent containers they can drop them into. You could do green/yellow/red for like/neutral/dislike and containers labeled with each kind of chocolate. (Simpler would be if you can just have tokens for "like" only). It's a nice visual showcase of everyone's preferences.
posted by lollusc at 7:14 PM on February 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


Use m&ms for tokens. You can special order them with a logo or words, and custom colors. Also good for a party favor. Not the bestest chocolate, but always popular.
posted by theora55 at 7:52 PM on February 7, 2018


Small data point: I would very probably vote "like" for all kinds of chocolate. Is your scale specific enough for the kind of data you need? Would you be better off with "love-like-neutral-dislike-hate" or something that allows for at least some variation among the positive emotions?
posted by pseudostrabismus at 8:32 PM on February 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


I created a very similar system recently, except with books. Here's a similar system that offloads a lot of the work until after the event, so that the user experience during the event is as smooth/easy as possible, and doesn't use any custom software:

== The user experience:

1) You check in! On check-in, you are given a sheet of 25 square stickers with QR codes.

2) You wander around and eat chocolates.

3) Each chocolate station has three different voting boards, each saying "like"/"neutral"/"dislike" on it. You vote by putting one of their QR code stickers on the corresponding sheet, like dot-voting.

4) After the event is over, you automagically get an email saying: "Here's what you voted for!", with a log of their likes/dislikes, links to chocolate company websites, etc.


== The event setup:

1. Using a pre-printed sticker sheet, you print 100 sheets of QR codes. Each sheets' QR codes is unique and different from all other sheets, but all the stickers on one sheet are the same. You also print a human-readable name on each sheet for each attendee. Also, you also print some extra sheets with numbers instead of names on them.

2. When people check in, the check-in table grabs a QR sticker sheet corresponding to the attendee. If there are walk-ins, then you grab the numbered sheets and note who took them instead by linking a number to a name - and log this in Airtable.

3. People walk around and vote.

4. At the end of the event, you collect all the voting boards with "like/neutral/dislike" on them, and scan them into Airtable using its mobile app & smartphone camera.

5. Ta-da! You now have an Airtable database of chocolates and users who liked/hated them, as well as a list of users and their liked/disliked chocolates.

Feel free to MefiMail if you have any questions.
posted by suedehead at 8:42 AM on February 8, 2018


« Older Questions about a protest group using public...   |   ADHD medication for children Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.