After the 2015 race we sent a survey to all participants, and also collected feedback from Facebook.
The good news was that it seems that most people enjoyed the race.
(in market research speak we got a Net Promoter Score of 68%, which in plain English means that 73% scored us 9 or 10 out of 10, and only 5% scored us 6 or below, when asked how likely they are to recommend the race to a friend).
However, the main reason for doing the survey was to understand things that we could do better (and things that we shouldn't change).
The main themes that arose and our plans for 2016 are below:
Toilets: need more of them .... We plan to make more toilets available - including providing a set of toilets & changing area at the nearby village hall, and making an extra two cubicles available at the car-park/sports hall.
Chip timing: a lot of discussion around this one, with views expressed both for and against .... We've looked into this one, and at the moment the pricing doesn't quite work for us - coming in at around an extra £1.50 per runner
Mementos: you want something, even if just a basic medal .... we're aiming to reintroduce a branded memento for 2016 included in the entry price - possibly a medal or pen, but other ideas welcomed. We also plan to sell additional merchandise such as t-shirts - we considered including these in the entry price - but we'd have had to put the price up too much to include a good quality t-shirt, and feedback was that people didn't want cheap t-shirts.
Arrangements for collecting numbers: various bits of feedback on this, from location to signage - hopefully fairly simple to address for 2016
KM markers a bit hard to see: We'll be making some new km markers!
Cars and runners: Some of the later finishers commented that cars were exiting the car parks as they ran past the car parks. Although we used marshals to segregate runners and cars, for 2016 we're reviewing car parking arrangements, and hope to have an alternative exit route so that we won't have don't have to do this.
Various: A range of other feedback from selection of drinks, better signage from car-park, emails getting lost in junk mail and looking how to keep pedestrians off the course towards the end of the race .... we'll do our best to act on these where we can.