Thank you for the great feedback! We’re certainly looking at these very things behind the scenes ourselves and reviewing them, but having this kind of feedback from the community as well is fantastic! While others may not agree, I personally see this feedback as a win from the event perspective since it shows that at least part of the community (yourselves) did enjoy the core idea, and had investment into it to the extent of making this kind of feedback.
This community designed unique event has been a bit of an experiment in this kind of thing. We’re not aware of an event like this having happened before, particularly with this much creative control given in the event. Overall, we’re very happy with the level of community involvement, and the results of it, but like any time you do something for the first time, there’s certainly aspects that could be improved upon. Once the event concludes, I might write a post discussing this, however we’re certainly analyzing the same kinds of things on our end as well. There is other considerations we have in this kind of event beyond just the polls themselves, however one of the core intents of this event was to provide the community the opportunity to have creative freedom in creating their very own unique outside of our influence (as much as reasonably possible).
When we reviewed other polling options, we ran into few other considerations:
1.) Interest exhaustion. To provide the amount of opportunity to ensure full community backing to have majority winning on each option, we would need a much larger set of polls. A longer running event would more easily lose interest from those involved and while it may remain majority of those that vote, there would be fewer members voting the longer the event runs.
2.) To avoid interest exhaustion we condense the number of posts within the event. If taking the route of being more thorough with each aspect, it would need to mean fewer aspects would be up to the communities decision. And that’s certainly a perfectly viable route, however with this event we wanted to experiment with giving the community pretty much complete control.
3.) While I absolutely love what I do: my time, and that of other social team members also isn’t ‘free’ unfortunately, and we need to organize ideas, write posts, create the polls, and post across various platforms with each one. It would also mean more time from the social team spent away from other things, such as answering questions, potentially other events, and many other behind the scenes planning and structure we do. This of course isn’t the biggest consideration in this kind of event as these kinds of events, particularly as it is part of what we do as a social team (it’s not taking us away from “our work”), but as a company cost is still something we need to consider.
In summary, we’ve been very happy with this event so far, and are really excited to the outcome. We agree that there’s improvements we can make to the process, and this kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. Once we’ve concluded the event, we’ll be doing a full analysis of how the event went, and what we could improve on. This feedback on the specific polling process certainly helps us in that aspect of the analysis It’s certainly possible we could do something like this again in the future, but with improvements from lessons learned during this event.