Laracon Online Conference Feedback

February 13, 2020 / Eric L. Barnes

For the Laracon Online conference, we used the new Laravel powered NPS survey software, Thermostat by Ian Landsman, to handle both ratings and feedback. The results of this survey is now released and made public. You can see the results from here.

Thermostat uses the NPS, or Net Promoter Score, to determine how much someone liked the event and it uses two items for feedback, a zero to ten scale, and a single question with open-ended feedback.

According to Wikipedia, the calculation is determined by:

Those who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called Promoters, and are considered likely to exhibit value-creating behaviors, such as buying more, remaining customers for longer, and making more positive referrals to other potential customers. Those who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled Detractors, and they are believed to be less likely to exhibit the value-creating behaviors. Responses of 7 and 8 are labeled Passives, and their behavior falls in the middle of Promoters and Detractors.[4]:51 The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters. For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives count towards the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score towards 0.[5]

The overall results of Laracon Online ended in a 70 NPS score with 439 promoters, 115 passives, and 30 detractors. For a first-year conference, I feel like that is an encouraging number, and a lot of great feedback was included for next year.

As I went through the responses, the one thing that stuck out to me is just how impossible it is to make everyone happy. Just like running this site, I try to publish items that are not always hardcore Laravel, but I think developers would be interested in it. Examples are the career section, covering developer tools, etc. Those always get more detractors, but also elicits positive feedback.

The conference is no different; some enjoyed every talk, others didn’t. Some thought they were too advanced, and others thought they were not advanced enough. Nobody will ever make something that suits everyone, and it’s encouraging by having such overwhelmingly positive feedback.

Thanks to everyone that left feedback and I can’t wait for next year’s event.