If you’re a trainer, presenter or do any type of public speaking you know there’s a lot more that goes into it than just what people see. Beyond the obvious prep work leading up to an event, there is also a fair amount of work afterward to collect feedback, distribute the supporting resources or handouts (you are creating a separate takeaway document, right?!) and sharing your contact information.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to handle those important post-event tasks with ease while saving you a lot of time in the process. Talkbook is a website that will collect ratings and feedback from your audience and also automate the distribution of any follow-up information and supporting materials you want to provide.

I’ve been using Talkbook for a while now and I’ll never do another event without it. (At least if I can help it.)

So how does it work? That’s the best part. It is quick and easy to get started.

After creating a free account, you’re ready to create your first talk page, which is basically just adding the details about your talk into the forms on the talk page which consist of things like:

• Title
• A unique keyword that becomes part of the URL you share with your audience
• The email incentive — what you’ll be giving to your audience
• Handouts: The links, documents, information etc you want to share

Beyond these basics, you can also turn on/off these advanced options :

• Collect their first name. (You’ll get email addresses automatically.)
• Collect a 1-10 rating.
• Collect feedback. (This enables open-ended comments and questions.)
• Customize the main text, which shows up in the subject line of the email your audience receives.
• Customize the contact info text.

With your talk page in place, you’ll get a unique URL to share with your audience that will make all the magic happen. You can even download a PowerPoint slide to add to your presentation deck if you don’t want to create your own.

That’s it! You’re all set and all you need to do is add the instruction slide at the end of your slide deck to tell your audience what to do and why they should do it. Everything is easy to do right then and there via the mobile devices they’ve got in their pockets. I like to make my own custom slide which looks like this.

When people visit your talk page URL they’ll get a nice easy to use, mobile-friendly form like this:

Ratings & Comments

If you choose to enable it, you can collect ratings and/or comments about your session.

Delivering Handouts & Contact Information

I love the feedback but my favorite feature of Talkbook is the way it distributes all the extra information and supporting materials related to you and your talk.

Instead of collecting business cards, then spending hours entering them as contacts (If you haven’t lost them before you get home!) and manually emailing your handouts, Talkbook automates this process so you’re audience gets everything you want them to have immediately after you wrap-up.

This is what the email that people will receive looks like:

And finally you don’t want to miss this part…the dashboard gives you a nice overview of everything you’ve collected.

Nice huh? So is the information you’ll get about the people from your audience. If they’ve used the same email to get your handouts as they use for their social media accounts Talkbook will connect you to them on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

And as if you needed any more reasons to give it a try, you can also export the emails to a .csv file or connect them directly with your MailChimp account.

What do you think? Useful? Worth trying? I’d love to hear your thoughts and how you handle gathering feedback and managing handouts for your events.  Leave a comment below.