Overall data:
- 56 valid responses
- 29 years old average. Oldest being 47 and youngest 21.
- 24 people didn't answer our question.
- From the 32 who answered our questions, we had 21 constructive answers (by constructive I mean not saying more beer or more girls)
We had a very common thread being the fact that we should group people by interests. It seems it gets some time until you get to know people that you can actually contribute/learn with. The lack of guidance and activities was also mentioned. Like hosting a topic (someone sharing presenting something) to be discussed during that event. People also said there is not enough food and/or drinks to keep the event going.
So extracting some ideas from the 1st research about how to make a great networking event we have:
- Have an agenda, including activities.
- Presentations during the event
- Tags for areas of expertise
- After the free beer/liquor having more to sell
- Coupons and information for relevant companies/organizations
- Sweet stuff to eat
- Having a theme as Why networking sucks and get the discussion going around it
- Instead of group people (1 suggestion) having them talking with different professionals (i.e. a techie talking with a musician).
- Offer challenges/problem solving so they can discuss solutions/strategies
- Social games and activities to promote interactions
- Color-tag for different profiles (techie; investor; intern)
- Creating projects where people can group under that interest. Matchmaking between people and interest.
So what I learned this week? That even not having a 100% of participation on our questionnaire we were still able to get insights of thing we haven't think about. Or event if we did we haven't make that happen.
What I mean is that we had 3 sunny fridays and they were all the same, but there is an opportunity of trying out new things every friday and having their returns. We can be selling beers and liquors and donating the profit for a cause, having games or themes, having a speaker. And figuring out what works and what not works and that's the difference between a startup environment, trying, failing, trying something new, refining, in a continuous development cycle.
I'm thrilled and doing my best to get more external insights, not only in a conversation (because we tend to merge their opinion with our own perception) but having data about it that can influence the process. We did that yesterday and we have material to work with for the next friday.
I think that says a lot and I'm really looking forward to the webinars and forms getting out of the building and bringing some fresh insights for us.
Artur Sousa
Thank you, Artur, for analysis of the responses, well done! I also went through the form and my suggestion is to ask more specifically for the event feedback, e.g. What do you like about this event? What do you dislike about this event? Suggestions to improve? So it would be more simple for people to align the question with specific event and bring in some improvements. As a suggestion from me, we can present part of our work to people in the big room where "30 under 30" was organized. We can also make a contact list publicly available, so that people keep staying in touch in future.
ReplyDeleteMaking the contact list publicly available is a pretty good idea actually! This creates engagement within the community that will hopefully go on even after Sunny Fridays has ended!
DeleteThanks for this Artur! Some good insights. I think we can divide the organisers of Sunny Fridays in a way that one person works on the content (how to make it more engaging), one person works on the logistics (drink allocation, fun stuff, labels etc) so that we can experiment with some of these suggestions next week!
ReplyDeleteSuch good ideas Ilya and Rucha, I think that might work really well having more specific roles such as developing the content. But I think that takes more than one because it involves the execution as well. Let's plan next friday since monday and I'm pretty sure we will find a very good strategy!!!
ReplyDelete