Once your event wraps up, you want to breathe a sigh of relief and move on. However, to improve your long-term event success, you need to pause and evaluate before you move forward.
Attendees generally do not offer you feedback on your events unsolicited. You might only receive negative feedback from a small percentage of those who actually experienced frustration during your event. You also have no way of knowing which parts people appreciated the most and which ones caused obstacles or annoyance.
To solve this problem, you need to create an effective post event survey. Writing these surveys and getting them out quickly to your attendees can help you reach people while your event is fresh in their memories. The questions will give you insight into not only what needs improvement, but also what you want to keep and what people really enjoyed during your event.
This information will help you plan future events and keep you connected with your attendees. Well-written and well-timed surveys let people know how much you appreciate their time and participation, which can also boost your overall relationship.
We have drafted 28 key questions that can help you write highly effective surveys to employ after your next event. These questions look at all the different components of your event, giving you the insight you need. Let’s look more closely at how you can create an effective post-event questionnaire.
Importance of Post-Event Surveys
Before we move forward, it helps to examine what makes these post-event surveys so valuable in your overall event planning process.
Understanding Attendee Experience
It is not enough to know that attendees did or did not appreciate your event. Even someone who enjoyed the occasion likely had moments they enjoyed more than others. Pinpointing precisely what people liked the most and where they got the most value can help you improve your events in the future. You will know where you need to make improvements and what areas people love, so you can emphasize them moving forward.
Attendee feedback can also help you figure out what went wrong in areas that people did not like. Did they think the Q&A session was too short? Did the breakout sessions not add enough value? Was registration a cumbersome process? Knowing only that people got annoyed, without knowing what needs to be fixed, does little to improve your future events.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Armed with the information you can gather from your post-event surveys, you can collect important data and insight to improve your plans in the future. Once you gather the responses from your attendees, you can use data analysis techniques to determine where you want to make adjustments for coming events and what steps you can take to avoid potential obstacles and frustrations.
For example, consider a post-event survey that discovers people had trouble entering all their information to register from mobile devices. This can lead to many people putting off their registration and ultimately failing to register. Another event might discover that attendees felt the speaker Q&A session was too short to offer much value, and they did not have time to ask their questions. Future events can take frustrations into consideration and make the next event even more successful.
Crafting Effective Post-Event Survey Questions
As you sit down to draft your post-event survey, let’s examine how you can use survey design strategies and structure to increase your rate of responses and keep people engaged as they work their way through it.
General Tips for Survey Design
You can structure your event questions in a variety of formats. The three most common include:
- Open-ended questions, where people can freely write their responses to your questions. These questions are valuable because they give people space to freely express their thoughts, which can give you insights and ideas you might not have otherwise considered.
- Multiple choice questions, where people select their answers from a list. These answers help because people can answer them quickly, and you can easily add all the different responses together for a data analysis.
- Ranking or rating questions, where people can rank or rate their responses to questions. You may want to include these answers because the data collected from these scales can also be easily quantified, such as people rating your event on a scale from “very dissatisfied to very satisfied.”
Keep in mind as you design your survey that the more effort and time you ask of people, the fewer responses you will receive. A shorter survey that takes less than 5 minutes to fill out will receive a significantly higher response rate than one that is all open-ended questions and might take 20 minutes or more to complete.
You will also likely create a few different versions of your survey, such as one for your attendees and for your sponsors. If you create a few different versions for your attendees, you can also collect data on a greater variety of questions.
While you draft your survey, try to target a few different areas of questions. For example, you might include a question about content, venue, registration, and value. If you want to get open-ended responses about your overall value, for example, you might want to make most of the other questions on the survey multiple choice so people do not get too overwhelmed when they open your survey.
When writing your questions themselves, focus on clarity and brevity. Getting too wordy in the question itself or writing a confusing question will increase the odds of people just clicking off the page. After you draft your questions, ask someone uninvolved with the process to read them over to make sure they achieve these goals.
Structuring the Survey
The order in which you place your questions will also impact people’s reactions to them. Starting with general questions, such as about the overall experience of value received from the event, and then moving to specific questions about different aspects of the event keeps the flow smooth. It prevents the feeling of jumping around and can increase overall clarity in the survey.
We also recommend keeping a logical flow to the questions to improve respondent engagement. For example, if you ask questions about different components of the event, try to keep the questions roughly oriented to the order in which they occurred during the event. People will be able to sense the flow of the survey and feel more inspired to keep going through the questions.
28 Essential Post-Event Survey Questions
Now that we have walked you through the importance of your survey and considerations to keep in mind, we will present our 28 questions that will walk you through the different categories you likely want to examine as you evaluate the success of your event.
Feedback on Event Organization
These questions will help you better understand the overall impression of the event’s flow.
- How would you rate the overall organization of the event?
- What did you think about the event scheduling and timing?
- Were the event materials and resources helpful and accessible?
Venue and Logistics
Venue and logistics both play critical roles in the overall event, so these questions will provide insight into how people responded to each.
- How satisfied were you with the venue’s location?
- What are your thoughts on the venue facilities?
- How did you find the registration process?
Content and Speakers
People come to hear your speakers, so knowing how valuable people found your content will help you plan your future itineraries.
- How would you rate the quality of the sessions and presentations?
- What topics did you find most valuable?
- Were the speakers engaging and knowledgeable?
Networking Opportunities
Networking is a valuable experience for professionals who like to connect with others across industries. Knowing the value people receive from this feature can also help you plan your future event components.
- Did you find sufficient opportunities to network?
- How satisfied were you with the networking sessions?
- What suggestions do you have for improving networking?
Overall Experience
Knowing how people rate their overall experiences can give you a good baseline to work with regarding the success of your event.
- On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this event to others?
- What was your favorite part of the event?
- What could we do to improve your overall experience?
Follow-Up and Future Engagement
The best events will encourage people to keep returning. Including questions about future engagement can help you tap into potential new leads.
- Would you like to receive information about future events?
- How could we keep you engaged with our organization post-event?
- Are there any topics you would like us to cover in future events?
Additional Feedback
These questions leave open space for people who might have additional comments to make.
- Is there anything you feel we missed or should have included?
- How did you hear about this event?
- What influenced your decision to attend this event?
- Were there any logistical challenges you faced during the event?
Rating and Comment Questions
Asking for comments or suggestions and ratings can also offer new insight that you might not have otherwise considered.
- Please rate your overall experience at the event (1-5 scale).
- How would you rate the value for the cost of the event?
- Any additional comments or suggestions you would like to share?
Questions for Exhibitors and Sponsors
Your sponsors and exhibitors play a crucial role in the success of your events. Knowing what they thought of your event is vital for planning future events.
- How satisfied were you with the content and experience provided by this event?
- Were you happy with the ROI you received from the event?
- How likely are you to sponsor/exhibit with us during future events?
Analyzing Survey Responses
Once you have created your survey, you want to sort through the responses and gather concrete data about how your event performed from the perspective of your attendees.
Best Practices for Data Analysis
As your survey responses begin to come in, have a plan for how you can use this information to improve your insight into the user experience. When you use a dashboard that lets you track responses and what they say, it can also help you filter by question and quickly collect the data you want to see.
As the results from your multiple choice and ranking questions come in, you can start to compile them for analysis. Analyze the positive aspects of your data and look for trends in the demographics of your respondents. Run the same types of checks on the negative responses and note any trends you see.
When it comes to analyzing your open-ended responses, you can use a few different strategies. You might use keywords and other indicators that help you group responses. They can then be examined more in depth to find trends and patterns.
If you only have a few attendees, consider having a team member read through responses to find potential interest patterns.
To help you manage these analytical processes, you have various tools available to help. Survey solutions that will match attendees with their survey responses for simplified demographic tracking will enhance your understanding. Survey software can also help you create word clouds to group and understand free responses accurately.
Making Improvements Based on Feedback
Once you have analyzed your employee feedback, start by fleshing out the components that people thought went really well. This might include your networking opportunities, the content provided, or the overall flow of the event, for example. The components you know went well should be emulated moving forward.
Next, look at the components that people rated poorly. These are the areas you want to make changes. Specifically, look at the insight regarding why people had a negative reaction to this area of the event. For example, did they not have enough time to network? Did they feel rushed between event components? This information will help you know what needs to be fixed.
As you plan for strategies to improve your future events, let your prospective attendees know that you listened to their feedback and what you have changed moving forward. You can do this a few different ways.
- Sending out emails. Once you collect your surveys, you might send out an email to all your participants thanking them for taking the time to answer and letting them know how you will use the insight. For example, you might explain that you will analyze the results and find ways to improve your future events moving forward.
- Notifying people personally. This might be a good strategy, particularly for high-value attendees, such as existing customers or major sponsors. Let them know the results of the survey and the steps you plan to take for future events.
- Promote your changes in future advertising. When you promote your next event, you might look for ways to communicate your adjustments based on feedback, such as, “Now with more networking time” or “Special, extended speaker Q&A session.”
Conclusion
Conducting post-event surveys can help you plan more successful events and maintain engagement with your attendees. You will let participants know that you care about their experiences and want to help them get the most possible value from your events.
As an event professional, you want to regularly ask for feedback from your attendees so you can continually refine your planning processes to produce better events in the future.
Start crafting your post event surveys using the above questions to get you started. See what kind of insights you can gather from your participants and the help it can offer you moving forward.
