Have you been tasked with setting up a feedback process for your organization? Perhaps you're amassing feedback from clients, patients, or customers. Maybe your focus is more internal, like accumulating input from employees, students, or volunteers.

Whatever group you are trying to gather feedback from, here are a few easy steps to help make your feedback gathering a success.

Step #1: Visualize good feedback

Many organizations collect feedback for the sake of collecting feedback. It is a checklist item that rarely leads to real change.

To not fall into that trap, visualize your feedback process from beginning to end by considering the following questions:

• Why are you gathering feedback?
• What are you going to do with it?
• Who is going to look at it?
• How often will the input be reviewed?
• How often will you gather it?
• What type of feedback do you imagine yourself receiving?
• What questions will you be asking?

After you've visualized the method, ask yourself, will this help your organization be more successful? If the answer is Yes - then you're ready to start building your process.

If the answer is a No - take some time to rethink your feedback process and goals until you discover the process that, in theory, will give you the feedback you need to improve.

Step #2: Use Technology

After you've visualized your feedback, the next step is to implement your process. While this could be something as simple as an old-fashioned suggestion box or paper surveys, we highly recommend utilizing some form of technology to help you collect, record, and analyze your data.

Using technology lets you gather feedback from more individuals in more diverse ways and will give you a higher chance of meeting your organization's goals.

Step #3: Automate It

After you have decided to use technology, the next step to building a rock-solid feedback system is automating the process. Using something like a feedback kiosk or automated email blasts, you can sit back and relax as the feedback continuously flows into your organization.

Step #4: Use It

Feedback is only as valuable as the actions it inspires. To build an effective feedback process, you'll want to make sure that you've got something in place to review feedback on a regular interval.

A straightforward way to do this is with a reoccurring meeting, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, to review the feedback you've received and make action items based on that feedback.

Step #5: Iterate on it

No matter how your process begins, it is going to need some improvement. Iterating on your plan can help you build a more robust feedback method over time. Try changing something small and recording the difference. For instance: Does changing the location surveys are given change how many responses you collect? Or Does using a kiosk gather more reactions than a different method?

After making these small changes, slowly move towards a more effective process by keeping changes that bring improvements and disregarding changes that cause issues.

Feedback Done Right

Feedback gathering doesn't have to be a painful process. By following the five steps above, you can make drastic improvements inside your organization without feeling the pain of an inefficient and broken feedback system. Instead, if done right, you can be gathering feedback year-round with your time and energy focused on how you can use that feedback, not on how you're going to get it.

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