In case you missed it, I designed a solution last year to collect session feedback for my annual Data Saturday Stockholm event, and I made this solution publicly available to anyone who runs a similar event. The setup is really simple – you just plug in a Sessionize API key, it collects all the necessary details on your sessions and speakers, and you’re off to the races. If you want to set it up in your own environment, that’s fine too – it’s all open source.

As of a few days ago, there’s also a handy reporting functionality, so you can send out feedback report links to all your speakers.

How the report works

From the admin panel, you can copy secret links to send out to your speakers. If you have a lot of speakers (or if you’re just lazy) you can automate this stuff by calling an API from a PowerShell script or other method of automation. The only caveat is that Sessionize does not publish speakers’ email addresses in their public API, so you’ll have to map those yourself.

Look and feel

Everything in the report is customizable, and a lot depends on the how you configure the questions.

You can configure all the questions, answer options and scoring when you set up the session templates in the database, and the color schemes and layouts can be customized with a CSS template.

• The speaker sees all their sessions in one report, with separate sections for each session.
• The session header shows how many reponses there were, as well as how the session performed compared to all the other sessions at the same event.
• The color of the bars can be configured when you set up the questions if you want to indicate better or worse options – these are the same colors that the attendee sees when they’re leaving the feedback.
• The shaded bar (slightly offset to the right) shows how other sessions were rated.

A core philosophy in the design of the feedback tool has been to keep feedback very simple for attendees. As a result, attendees are initially only shown a few high-level questions, but if they provide low scores on a question, they’re shown additional, clarifying questions.

Take it for a swing

If you’re the admin of a Sessionize event and want to give it a go yourself, just go to eval.datasaturdays.com or eval.sqlsaturday.com, and follow the setup instructions. If you want to customize the experience, you’re free to submit a pull request with your own logo, CSS, or question template.