You’re Not Hearing What Your Attendees Really Think

And you are still underestimating the intelligence already inside your event.

Every event organizer speaks fluently about engagement, about immersion, about connection, about the elusive chemistry that turns a scheduled gathering into something people remember rather than merely attend, yet when it comes to listening in any meaningful or operationally useful way, the industry continues to rely on habits formed decades ago, long before events became the economic, cultural, and reputational engines they now represent.

Most events still default to post-event surveys sent after the ballroom has emptied, the crew has struck the set, and the emotional truth of the experience has already begun to fade, at which point a small and deeply unrepresentative group responds, often motivated by frustration or obligation rather than insight, producing feedback that feels official enough to cite but rarely precise enough to guide real decisions.

This creates a dangerous illusion of understanding. Organizers believe they know how their event landed, while the most valuable intelligence never arrives in a usable form, because the moments that matter most occur in motion, in conversation, in reaction, in fleeting shifts of energy that disappear if no one is listening closely enough to capture them.

Attendees leave with sharp observations, moments of delight, moments of friction, and ideas sparked by conversations that will never appear in a spreadsheet, yet attendees are only one part of the intelligence equation, and the industry’s fixation on post-event attendee opinion has quietly eclipsed a much richer source of truth.

Everyone who works on an event is its eyes and ears.

Venue staff see where flow breaks down and where it quietly succeeds. Caterwaiters feel the mood of a room shift long before a planner does. Registration teams watch confusion form or dissolve at the threshold of arrival. Front-of-house and back-of-house crews sense timing, stress, and momentum instinctively, often long before leadership becomes aware that something is off or something has gone right.

It remains one of the most maddening sights in this business to see capable, perceptive staff discouraged from attending sessions, instructed to stay invisible, or hidden away in offices rather than encouraged to observe the experience unfolding around them, because every time that happens an event willingly blinds itself to hundreds of real-time insights that could have improved the experience while it was still alive.

This blind spot has persisted in part because feedback has traditionally been treated as an after-action report rather than live intelligence, which is why platforms like Explori have played such an important role in professionalizing how the industry measures impact, helping organizers collect structured feedback, benchmark performance across portfolios, quantify attendee sentiment, and articulate value in a language that sponsors, executives, and boards understand.

Explori has elevated event measurement by moving it beyond anecdote and into analysis, enabling comparisons over time and across events, and giving leaders the ability to demonstrate outcomes rather than simply assert them, which has been a necessary and overdue evolution.

Yet even the most rigorous post-event measurement leaves a critical gap unfilled, because no amount of benchmarking can recover insight that was never captured in the moment, and no retrospective analysis can replace the perspective of people who were physically inside the experience while it was alive.

That gap is where Jotto operates, and it is why I chose to invest, not out of novelty or enthusiasm for another tool, but because when you understand the business deeply you recognize when a solution addresses a structural flaw rather than a surface inconvenience.

https://www.jotto.ai

What makes Jotto work is not technology for its own sake, but a realistic understanding of human behavior inside live environments, where confidence is uneven, attention is fragmented, and insight rarely arrives through formal channels. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ritual of live audience question and answer sessions, which have persisted largely unchanged despite being quietly dysfunctional.

In theory, Q and A is meant to surface curiosity from the room. In practice, it rewards proximity to microphones, comfort with public performance, and a willingness to think out loud in front of peers. The same voices dominate. Moderators filter questions under time pressure, often selecting the safest phrasing rather than the most interesting inquiry. Meanwhile, many of the smartest attendees remain silent, not because they lack curiosity, but because the format itself discourages thoughtful participation.

Jotto removes performance from the equation. Questions are submitted naturally by voice or text in the moment they arise, without the social friction of standing up or competing for airtime. What reaches the speaker is not volume but relevance, because questions surface based on quality, resonance, and alignment with what the room is actually thinking. The result is a conversation shaped by collective intelligence rather than individual bravado, giving speakers access to the audience’s real curiosity while time still allows for depth rather than deflection.

The same logic applies to event customer service, another area where gatherings routinely fail not for lack of care, but for lack of intelligent pathways. Anyone who has watched attendees wander corridors looking for help understands how quickly minor confusion becomes frustration and how easily frustration hardens into a lasting negative impression. Staff are stretched thin. Information desks are hard to find. Problems linger simply because there is no clear, immediate channel for surfacing them.

By turning every attendee’s phone into a direct line, Jotto collapses that friction, allowing issues to be voiced naturally and routed immediately to the people best positioned to resolve them. A lost guest becomes a solved problem rather than a resentful one. A small issue is addressed before it escalates into a story told later online. Resolution happens while goodwill is still intact, which is the only moment when service actually matters.

Equally important, though far less exploited by most organizers, is what happens when something goes right. Events generate moments of genuine enthusiasm, clarity, and connection, yet the industry has trained itself to harvest those reactions days later, after emotion has faded and memory has flattened experience into polite summary. Jotto allows those moments to be captured as they occur, in the attendee’s own words and voice, preserving authenticity that cannot be recreated after the fact. These are not manufactured testimonials but living ones, and they resonate precisely because they were recorded before the moment passed.

Placed alongside post-event measurement platforms like Explori, Jotto supplies the missing temporal dimension, capturing nuance, friction, momentum, and success while there is still time to respond. Together, they point toward a more complete intelligence system for events, one that understands not only outcomes, but lived experience.

What becomes possible next is where this conversation truly matters, because feedback itself is only the beginning of a much larger transformation already underway in how gatherings are designed, interpreted, and refined.

As intelligence becomes increasingly built into the architecture of events, not as add-ons but as ambient systems quietly listening and correlating, feedback loops will no longer feel episodic or reactive, but continuous and cumulative, shaping decisions before they are locked rather than explaining them afterward.

As platforms like Jotto and Explori grow more sophisticated and increasingly integrate with other data layers, something more consequential begins to emerge, which is a deeper understanding not just of satisfaction or friction, but of motivation itself.

This is where the work of the Valuegraphics Project, founded by David Allison, becomes especially relevant, because values data explains the underlying drivers beneath behavior, loyalty, participation, and advocacy, moving planning beyond demographics and surface preferences and into what people actually care about.

https://valuegraphics.com

When real-time sentiment, longitudinal performance data, operational observation from staff, and values-based motivation are analyzed together, planners gain a clearer picture not only of what people liked or disliked, but why they behaved as they did, what moved them emotionally, and what compelled them to engage fully.

The future of gatherings will not be defined by louder stages or denser technology stacks, but by attentiveness, responsiveness, and the discipline of listening while the experience is still unfolding, recognizing that the smartest intelligence in any event often belongs to the people without microphones, titles, or badges.

If an event only listens after it is over, and sidelines the people who witnessed every beat of it while it was happening, then it is not managing experience at all, but reconstructing it after the fact.

The more important question is not whether feedback is being collected, but how much intelligence is still being ignored while there is time to act on it.