Feedback on 2012 AECB Conference

Feedback on this year’s conference has now been collated. We will be putting it on the website soon and thank you to those of you who took the time to fill in the survey.

On the whole, the feedback was very positive especially when looking at areas such as organisation and quality of workshops. There was a lot of criticism regarding the accommodation and we fully accept that it was well below the standard we had been led to expect as the rooms had been steam cleaned and then locked up rather than aired. As usual, some people thought that the food was very good and others didn’t like it at all. Also, there were some comments about the food being vegetarian. We would like to point out that when booking the catering, we do tend to choose the basic package in order to keep costs as low as possible. We specify vegetarian as we have a large amount of vegetarian members and as most venues contract out their catering, it would be very difficult for us to monitor how the food was sourced, in terms of animal welfare etc.

A constant comment over the years has been that there is often a clash of workshops and people want to go to more than one at the same time. We have tried to relieve this by running themes throughout the event but this clash is unfortunately inevitable. As we do not pay for presentations and the presenters themselves want to participate in the conference, we do not think it is fair to ask them to run the workshops more than once. Having said that, we are looking at ways of spreading the information from all the workshops.

Copies of some of the presentations are now on the AECB web site and we will be putting more on as they come in. A full copy of feedback with all comments etc. will be on the website soon.  In addition, a write up of the evening debate ‘Sustainability is more than just Energy’ and presentations from the 2012 AECB Conference are available here.

Thanks to everyone who came and made the whole event so interesting and enjoyable.

Below is a very brief summary of the feedback;

1.Please rate the booking process

Excellent,  Very Good,  Good,      OK,       Bad

24.4%        48.9%         17.8%      8.9%     0%

2. How would you rate the information you were sent prior to the event? What more information would have been useful.

Excellent,  Very Good,  Good,      OK,       Bad

18.8%        43.8%          29.2        8.3         0%

3. Please rate the range of workshops and add any comments on workshops you attended and how they could have been improved

Excellent,  Very Good,  Good,      OK,       Bad

40.4%        46.8             8.5%       4.3%

4. Is 90 minutes about right for the workshops?

Yes. 93.6

No.     6.4

5. Would you be interested in themed days so you could attend only one day to save money and time.

Yes  54.3%

No    45.7%

6. Please rate your experience of the event as a whole.

Excellent,  Very Good,  Good,      OK,       Bad

39.6%        45.8%          8.3%       6.3%      0%

7. Would you be happy for the event to be opened out to a limited number of non AECB members?

Yes. 89.6

No    10.4