How to Get Feedback After Your Funfair

Gathering feedback after your funfair or any other big event is crucial for understanding its impact, measuring success, and identifying areas for improvement. Here's how to effectively collect and use feedback to inform your future event planning.

Collecting Feedback

• Surveys and Questionnaires: Deploy digital surveys or paper questionnaires to gather attendees' thoughts on various aspects of the event, such as their favourite fairground rides, the appeal of fairground side stalls and games, and overall satisfaction. Keep surveys brief and to the point to encourage participation.
• Social Media and Online Reviews: Monitor social media channels and online review sites for comments about your event. Attendees often share candid experiences and photos, especially of high-engagement attractions like arcade game machines.
• Feedback Boxes: Place feedback boxes at exit points of your event for attendees to drop in their thoughts written on cards or slips. This can be particularly effective for gathering insights from guests who prefer anonymity.
  Staff and Volunteer Feedback: Don’t overlook the insights your event staff and volunteers can provide. They’re likely to observe attendee behaviours and reactions first-hand and can offer valuable perspectives on what worked well and what didn’t.

Analysing Feedback

• Identify Trends: Look for common themes in the feedback received. If multiple attendees mention long queues at thrill rides or rave about a particular game, these are valuable insights that can guide your future planning.
• Quantitative Analysis: For survey responses, use quantitative analysis to measure satisfaction levels, attraction popularity, and overall event success. This data can help justify decisions for future event investments or changes.
• Qualitative Insights: Qualitative feedback, such as open-ended survey responses or social media comments, can provide deeper insights into attendee experiences. This feedback can reveal nuanced views on the event atmosphere, quality of attractions, and guest satisfaction.

Using Feedback for Improvement

• Enhance Popular Elements: If certain attractions or aspects of your event receive widespread praise, consider how you can further enhance these in future events. For example, expanding the variety of games and rides or adding more food vending tricycles to reduce queues.
• Address Criticisms Constructively: Use criticisms as opportunities for improvement. If guests mention that certain attractions felt outdated, explore newer, more engaging options for your next event.
• Implement Suggestions: Attendee suggestions can be a goldmine of ideas for future events. Whether it’s a request for more diverse entertainment or enhanced seating areas, consider how these suggestions can be realistically implemented.
• Communicate Changes: Let your attendees know that their feedback has been heard and acted upon. This can be done through email newsletters, social media, or announcements on your website, demonstrating your commitment to continuous improvement and attendee satisfaction.

Feedback is an invaluable tool for event improvement, offering direct insights into the attendee experience and perceptions of success. By effectively collecting, analysing, and acting on feedback, you can ensure that each event you host is better than the last!

Different People Can Tell You Different Things About the Event

Useful feedback does not necessarily come from one audience. Visitors can comment on their experience, event staff can identify operational issues, suppliers may notice practical problems, and venue teams can provide another perspective on how the site functioned.

Looking at these viewpoints together can provide a more useful picture than relying solely on a general satisfaction score.

Ask About Specific Parts of the Funfair

Broad questions can produce broad answers. When reviewing a funfair, it can be more useful to separate entertainment, queues, catering, layout, accessibility and other aspects of the visitor experience.

How to Choose the Right Funfair Rides & Games can help when reviewing whether the entertainment mix suited the audience, while How to Manage Queues at Funfairs provides useful context if waiting times or congestion appear repeatedly in visitor comments.

Feedback Can Reveal Layout Problems You Did Not See

An event organiser cannot personally observe every part of a busy site throughout the day. Comments from visitors and staff may identify confusing routes, unexpectedly busy areas or attractions that were less visible than intended.

How to Place Funfair Rides Around the Site provides related guidance when using those findings to reconsider a future layout. Event Planning and Logistics FAQs also covers wider site-planning considerations.

Review Catering Separately from the Entertainment

Food can have its own patterns of demand, queues and visitor expectations. Feedback about menu choice, serving areas or the location of catering can therefore be considered separately before being combined with the wider event review.

Food and Catering FAQs provides further catering guidance, while How Mobile Food Carts & Bars Run at Outdoor Events looks at how serving points interact with visitor movement at outdoor events.

Include Accessibility in the Post-Event Review

Feedback can be particularly valuable when considering how different visitors experienced the event environment. Access routes, information, facilities and individual attractions may not work in the same way for everybody, so comments can identify areas that deserve closer consideration before another event.

Disabled Accessibility and Inclusivity at Funfairs & Fairgrounds and Funfair Accessibility FAQs provide related guidance for reviewing accessibility and inclusion.

Staff Observations Can Explain What Visitor Surveys Cannot

Visitors can describe what they experienced, while staff may be able to explain what was happening operationally at the same time. Combining these perspectives can help distinguish an isolated complaint from a recurring issue that affected part of the event.

For safety-related observations, Health and Safety FAQs provides a route into our wider safety guidance. Significant operational or safety matters should be reviewed through the appropriate event-management processes rather than relying only on informal feedback.

Turn Repeated Comments into Planning Decisions

The value of feedback comes from what happens next. Repeated comments might suggest changing the balance of fairground rides and fairground side stalls and games, altering the site layout, providing different catering or reconsidering how visitors move between attractions.

Keeping a record of these findings can also make them useful when planning a recurring annual event rather than starting the review from scratch each year.

Use the Review to Shape Your Next Funfair

Post-event feedback can become the starting point for the next planning cycle. Once organisers know what worked well and what deserves attention, they can make more informed decisions about entertainment, logistics and the overall visitor experience.

How to Ensure the Safety of Your Guests at Your Funfair provides further guidance on visitor considerations, while our Guides cover other aspects of funfair and event planning. You can also browse all products or contact us when planning your next event.