CIC Diwali Mela 2017 - Feedback Summary
Thank you all for being a part of the incredible journey that was the CIC Diwali Mela 2017 held on 4th Nov at the Mexican Heritage Plaza. We had over 500 attendees, over 100 participants, over 50 volunteers and over a 1000 hours collectively spent preparing for the grand event. Ably led by PNG team comprised of Pallavi, Nekzad and Geetha and supported by a great team of volunteers, we had a program that by many measures was out biggest. Like we have done in past years, we solicited your feedback and you responded enthusiastically with very candid opinions of where we did right and where there is an opportunity for us to do better.
Here in the Cambrian Indian Community, we take your feedback very seriously. The event you saw this year was a result of a lot your feedback over the past years and this year will be instrumental in shaping how we approach the event next year and in future years. To that end, we will share what you shared with us in two parts- the first part is this report on our blog with all the raw data and feedback you provided us on every aspect of the program. The second part is an in-person feedback session that will be scheduled soon (once we get everyone’s calendars aligned) where the Board will discuss your feedback in more specific terms and discuss how we will learn and improve from it. So, without further ado, here is all that 72 of you told us about your experiences with Diwali Mela 2017. I am presenting them here without any commentary.
Overall Experience
Ticketing and Registration
Auditorium, Seating and Other Logistics
Program Quality
Snacks and Break
Volunteering
Next year
A Few Thoughts
Often times it is forgotten that every single volunteer in this event committed their time willingly for the benefit of the community. To that end, we see this feedback not as an opportunity to find faults at how individuals functioned but more as organizational successes and failures. We fix where we didn’t do well. We repeat and double down on what was well received. Sometimes we realize that there are problems with no practical solution or only sub-optimal solutions that will not appease everyone. In those circumstances, we bias towards the solution that either hasn't been tried before or the one with the least inconvenience. How a particular aspect of the event is perceived by an audience member is different from that of a participant which is different from that of a coordinator. The time commitment varies vastly between ferrying their kid to practice sessions versus someone else who spent every Saturday and Sunday for the 3 months leading up to the event working on a focused role. There is literally a few hundred hours of difference in time spent working on the event.
We received a lot of valuable free form feedback on how we could do this event better. We value those inputs. In addition, we request members of this community to take an active role in future years of the event so they experience first hand the active debates and deep-dive sessions that happen among the core team prior to making a decision- whether it is the duration of snack time or seating arrangements (easily the most complex effort this year) or ticket price. This helps in understanding why certain things were done the way they were. This is not to explain away any lapses in execution but to provide context on what happens in the background leading up to the event.
Conclusion
As you can see, given the sheer scale of this year’s event, there was a lot of passionate feedback and opinion and we are thankful for such an involved community. We look forward to discussing the with as many members of the community who can attend the feedback session.