Perfecting A Workshop

STATUS: It’s another late one.

What’s playing on the iPod right now? AIN’T NO SUNSHINE by Bill Withers

I spent this evening working on my PowerPoint presentation for a workshop I’m giving this weekend. I’ve been doing this particular class for more than 2 years but about 4 months ago, I had a real epiphany on how to teach writers the art of perfecting that pitch paragraph in query letters.

I hadn’t had a chance to revamp the presentation until now. My only wish is that I had this realization sooner. This might sound odd but the best feedback I’ve ever received is when my husband sat in on one of my classes and really critiqued the heck out of it (and he's not even remotely in the field of publishing so he had a fresh perspective). I made a ton of changes after his input.

Guess he’s not afraid to tell me where it missed. Big smile here.

I know that conferences often have participants fill out evaluation sheets at the end of each workshop but as a conference presenter, I’ve never once seen them. I think the evals are mainly used to see if the workshop was beneficial to the attendees and whether it’s worth having again at that conference.

But I wish that conference organizers would also distribute an eval that could be shared with the presenter. I’d love to know from those attending what worked, what missed, what was confusing, or even what really rocked and more time should be spent on XYZ. Then I would have a real shot at perfecting this workshop (and it might not have taken me 2 years to hit my realization…)

I’m a former corporate trainer so that’s part of why I’d probably like this. And I know from my corp. train days that I often received a lot of evals with comments such as “great workshop.” Although that made me feel great, it’s not that helpful in pinpointing weak spots in the presentation. Maybe list one thing you loved about the workshop (‘cause, hey, everyone likes to hear praise), one thing you didn’t, and then a specific suggestion on what would have made that better.

Can’t hurt and it can certainly help me to tweak for the next workshop I give.