And the results are..........

.....mostly good to great, with areas that need to be addressed (which I will get into).  I am referring to the exhibitor and attendee results of BEA 2010 from the BEA Exhibitor & Attendee Post Show research.  It is critical information that is one of the biggest drivers in planning and strategy for BEA 2011.  This is a publishing industry event, so people do love to write - we received 40 pages of write in comments aside from the survey questions - well over 1,000 comments.  Every single one of them are read.  The comments that match up to the survey results are pulled out and held up when we as saying 'how do we fix this issue?'. 

Some top line results:
Attendee Satisfaction:  65% of BEA's attendee's are Completely or Very Satisfied. 
Attendee Loyalty: 71% are Extremely or Very Likely to attend in 2011.
Exhibitor Satisfaction:  62% are Completely or Very Satisfied (up from 47% in '09)
Exhibitor Loyalty: 69% are Extremely or Very Likely to attend in 2011.

There is always room to improve these numbers, but we are thrilled that 2/3's of BEA's exhibitors and attendees rate BEA so highly.  The numbers from what we term detractors (people who are not happy with the event, get no value and are not likely to return) has trended downward 3 straight years and is less than 10% of the overall BEA audience. 

Let me address the biggest complaint we did get, which was lumped under 'Organization' - that was the crowding and the congestion mostly in the Autographing Area as well as the show floor.   We have already expanded the amount of space for 2011 between the autographing and the exhibit stands.  We will have satellite signing areas and address autographing in booths so it will reduce the congestion around the show floor.  I promise - this will be fixed, you can plan that BEA 2011 will be easier to navigate.

I have to admit being confused by some results.  The #1 reason for attendees who love BEA to recommend attending  is "Number of Publishers & Authors".  The #1 reason for attendees who did not like BEA that would recommend NOT attending is 'Not Enough Vendors'.   There are other areas where we get conflicting data of people attending the same event at the same time have the opposite perceptions.  We will dig deeper into those, but please feel free to contact me to let me know how I can make BEA a better event for you.