Silly conference survey

[Richmond]

On 09/09/2015 01:41 PM, Mark Waddingham wrote:
>> The survey asked if one were likely to attend; but as the choice of
>> where one could attend was restricted the results would be
>> like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>
> Err - no - we had a shortlist of areas in which we know we could 
> afford to run a conference based on the data that we have (i.e. get 
> enough people to buy tickets to attend so that we can pay for the thing).
>
> The survey was about finding out which of those was likely to be the 
> most successful (in terms of a bums on seats metric).
>
>> Had you offered, say, Munich or somewhere on the Pacific rim
>> (Shanghai???) you might have got quite a few people to say they might
>> attend; but by restricting the choices you will never know.
>
> Indeed, we could have given a list of an arbitrary number of places - 
> Munich, Shanghai, Outer Hebrides, Tristan da Cunha, Nuaha...
>
> However all that would have done would be to reduce the focus of the 
> survey, meaning results would have been spread making it substantially 
> less useful.
>
> How do we know this? Because we've run surveys for conferences like 
> that in the past and they didn't really give us the information we 
> really needed because they were not focused and/or specific enough.
>
> Mark.
>

Aha.

Thanks.

Richmond.