What would make you turn in your eval?

We’re working on lots of details for Southwest Fox right now. One of them is figuring out what to offer attendees to ensure that evaluation forms get turned out.

As you can see from some of our previous posts (like The Economics of Conference Food or They like us! They really, really like us!), we really pay attention to the evaluations that our attendees submit. We crunch the numbers they give us and we read all the comments more than once. We may not be able to implement all the changes that people request, but we do at least consider them.

We provide every attendee with a packet of evaluation forms at registration. The packet includes an overall conference evaluation and a short evaluation for each time slot. Unfortunately, lots of people don’t turn in their evaluation packets.

Last year, we were able to increase the yield of evals significantly. Microsoft had given three MSDN licenses to each developer MVP to give away. A number of our speakers and several other friends of Southwest Fox donated some of those gift licenses for raffles. We reserved the last three for a drawing including only those who submitted evaluations.

This year, we don’t have a big-ticket item like that to give away. So our question is what would make you turn in your eval? We know that some people will turn in evaluations with no prize at all. If you’re not one of those, help us figure what to use an incentive.

We want to keep making Southwest Fox better and to do that we need feedback. So give us some ideas on keeping those cards and letters coming.