Use feedback to evaluate
Take the time to reflect on the experiences your participants and your team members had during the project or activity. This will improve your future activities and work practice.
Why participant feedback is important
Participant feedback will help improve future activities. To make sure the feedback methods you provide are accessible, ask participants what they need or provide different ways to obtain feedback.
Accepting and acting on feedback helps you and people with disability by:
- providing valuable lessons and insights to improve future activities
- demonstrating you are invested in improving the experience of people with disability who interact with your organisation
- supporting you to adopt practices for greater accessibility and inclusivity in your work.
Relevant pages
Plan: Meet people’s accessibility needs
How to ask for feedback
Consider asking a few key questions and providing an option for people to provide general feedback to increase the likelihood of getting responses. Key questions could be about:
- the accessibility of an activity or project
- what to change or do differently to make an activity or project more accessible.
Examples
- Ask about the accessibility of an activity or project
- “Could you participate fully in [this activity or these activities or this project]?”
- “How well were your access needs met?”
- Ask what to change or do differently to make an activity or project more accessible
- “What else could we have done to better support your participation?”
- “How could we improve our [activity or project]?”
- Give an option to leave general feedback
- “What else would you like to tell us?”
- “What other comments or feedback do you have?”
Ways you can obtain feedback
Accept feedback throughout and at the end of your project or activity. Provide multiple channels, including discrete or anonymous options and in-person or remote options that allow people to provide feedback through their preferred method. Examples could include:
- Written and/or drawn feedback
- survey
- paper form
- anonymous submission channel.
- Verbal feedback
- spoken feedback to someone running or supporting the activity
- anonymous phone line or audio message
- organiser’s phone number
- semi-structured interview.
- Video feedback
- link with a submission box.
Relevant pages
Respond to feedback
If you have received significant feedback regarding a participant’s experience of the activity or topics covered, it may be important to respond either individually or as part of follow-up communication with all participants.
When you have received critical feedback, it is important to own your mistakes and communicate your plans to improve your practice even if you will not engage the same participants in the future. Being honest about errors and omissions is important for building and maintaining good relationships with your participants and a good reputation in the community at large.
It is good practice to provide participants with access to a formal complaints process outside of the project or activity – for example, managed at the facilitation team’s organisational level.
Reflect with your team
Take the time to reflect on the activity or project with your team. This is a crucial step to improve your practice, regardless of whether you received feedback from participants.
General good practice principles for team reflection
- Be honest.
- Minimise power imbalances between team members.
- Think about the things you did well and what helped them happen.
- Think about things that could have gone better and what could have helped.
- Consider how you will share lessons across your organisation to improve inclusion and accessibility in your working standards.
If you have people with disability in your project team delivering an IAP2 Spectrum empower role, include them in the team reflection step.
Relevant pages
Context: Define the level of participation
Agile and user-centred process (DTA Digital Service Standard)