Imagine you’ve just attended an amazing corporate event. Whether it was a conference, destination meeting, or incentive trip, you now feel ready to apply what you’ve learned, leverage connections, and focus your energy on new goals.
You’ve been sharing your excitement with colleagues, supervisors, and your network, but have you shared your experience with the event organizers? Not only is completing post-event feedback crucial for event hosts, but providing this information is also beneficial for attendees because it will be used to enhance their event experiences in the future.
Quick Links
- Why Post-Event Surveys Are Important
- How to Deliver Post-Event Surveys
- Tips for Getting More Survey Responses
- Tips for Writing Your Questions
- Post-Event Survey Sample Questions
- Gather Information Using Effective Post-Event Surveys
Why Post-Event Surveys Are Important
For event hosts, post-event surveys and feedback are crucial for determining the overall success of your event. You’ll want to be able to gauge your net promoter score, overall enjoyment, value, and the other significant takeaways your attendees had.
Additionally, you’ll also want to survey any volunteers, sponsors, vendors, presenters, and speakers. Surveying each of the attendees, regardless of their role, will be vital to the planning process for your next event, which will focus on improving the experience and increasing your successes.
How to Deliver Post-Event Surveys
One of your primary goals with post-event surveys is to get a statistically significant return from attendees—enough feedback to help you truly measure the success of your event. However, it’s important to keep in mind that a secondary goal should be to collect those surveys in a timely manner.
The longer respondents take to reply, the more likely they may be to forget essential details that will be useful in understanding quantitative scores, event reflection, and future planning. Further, you may get more detailed, qualitative data with specific examples and experiences if attendees receive and respond to the survey promptly.
With those two goals in mind, you want to deliver your survey request on the day the event ends, preferably before the end of the day. This can enable attendees who are traveling to respond during layovers or downtime before departure.
Finally, send your survey via email and via your event app with a push notification. Essentially, you want your post-event survey to be easy to find and easy to access, so ensuring it’s mobile friendly will also be important.
Tips for Getting More Survey Responses
In addition to sending surveys quickly and via multiple channels, there are other ways to ensure attendees complete your survey.
1. Keep Your Post-Event Survey Brief and Break It Up
Remember being handed multi-page tests in school? They were overwhelming. If your attendee just had an amazing experience, few things will put them off like an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of questions that look time-consuming.
Keep it short and simple. That may mean breaking up questions into chunks or categories and asking only two to three questions per category.
2. Incentivize Engagement for Your Survey
Add in rewards for completing surveys. Consider entering respondents in a drawing with a grand prize or awarding points for survey questions answered and allowing attendees to use those points for additional swag. This is also a great way to handle surplus swag.
3. Send the Survey Early and Remind Attendees in Closing Events
It may seem premature to send the survey on the final day of your event, but the sooner you get surveys in attendees’ hands, the sooner they can respond.
Further, if you send it the morning on the last day, any final session presenters can direct attendees to the survey and encourage them to respond.
4. Collect and Verify Your Data
During registration, be sure to collect contact information for all attendees. This is key, but so is verifying that data is accurate and has not changed.
For example, if someone registered for your event six months ago, contact details may have changed, so provide an opportunity to update or verify this important information. You can do this during registration or during an intro session when you encourage guests who have not downloaded the event app to do so.
5. Personalize the Survey
As with many elements associated with your event, personalizing your surveys will boost engagement. Attendees may feel that they don’t have to respond because they assume everyone else will, so personalizing the request or survey can make guests feel valued while causing them to realize their response matters.
Tips for Writing Your Questions
So if you’re keeping it short, what are the best methods to ensure you get responses and data that has value? The best way to do that is to consider the questions you’re including in your survey.
1. Separate Your Surveys
If you’re trying to adhere to the “keep it short” guideline, one of the best ways to do that is to tailor your survey to the right audience.
For example, you need to ask attendees different questions from your vendors, so rather than having guests sort through questions, create separate surveys to obtain the pertinent data from the correct source. In this way, you are shortening your surveys for each group, which will result in more feedback and more accurate results.
2. Mix Up Your Questions
To get a complete view of attendee experience, you want to mix the questions up, asking both quantitative and qualitative (open-ended) questions.
While quantitative responses will get you clear data, qualitative questions can provide more concrete information about those experiences. For example, if someone gives a 7/10 score for a specific session and you haven’t asked an open-ended question or follow-up, it’s difficult to know what could be improved.
3. Capture the Net Promoter Score or Overall Impression First
Prior to asking any other questions that may influence your guests, ask for their overall impression of the event or how likely they would be to recommend the event to others. Essentially, you want to capture their initial impression before you may remind them of one particular experience, which might skew results.
4. Use Multiple Choice or Ranking Questions
These question formats are generally considered less taxing as respondents simply need to check a box or pick a number. Remember to be clear about the rating scale (10 for best, 1 for worst), so you get accurate data.
The easier you make the questions, the more likely you are to get responses; you can always offer the opportunity to provide more information in addition to the rating.
5. Know What Data You Need
In short, cut the excess. You may want to begin by writing an exhaustive survey, then whittle it down to a more manageable size that focuses on the answers you really want and need.
Length is one of the major determinants of whether your attendees complete your survey, so keeping it short while still receiving essential information is crucial.
Post-Event Survey Sample Questions
With those tips in mind, what kinds of questions do you want to ask? How do you write them in a way that provides accurate, constructive information?
The phrasing of survey questions is important to get valid information, so even multiple choice questions must be created in a way that allows all possible answers.
Below are 26 sample questions you could potentially ask your attendees, speakers, presenters, or vendors. Remember, these are just sample questions—be sure to determine which questions are most relevant for you.
Sample Questions for Attendees
- How would you rate your overall event experience? (Ranked)
- Would you recommend this event (or similar events) to friends, colleagues, or customers? (Yes or no)
- How likely are you to recommend this event (or similar events) to friends, colleagues, or customers? (Ranked)
- What motivated you to attend this event? (Open ended)
- How did you hear about this event? (Multiple choice)
- Which sessions were most valuable to you? (Multiple choice)
- Which speakers were your favorite/most influential/most engaging? (Multiple choice)
- How satisfied were you with the following?
- Venue (Ranked)
- Food (Ranked)
- Session variety (Ranked)
- Entertainment (Ranked)
- Activities (Ranked)
- Were there any sessions that did not meet your expectations? (Yes or no, but leave the option for more information with an open-ended section)
- How would you rate networking opportunities to speak with other guests? (Ranked)
- How useful was the event app? (Ranked)
- How well-organized/scheduled was the event? (Ranked)
- What could we include or improve to make the event better? (Open ended)
- Is there anything you would have liked to add to the event or your experience? (Open ended)
Sample Questions for Speakers/Presenters/Vendors
- How would you rate your overall event experience? (Ranked)
- Would you recommend this event (or similar events) to friends, colleagues, or customers? (Yes or no)
- How likely are you to recommend this event (or similar events) to friends, colleagues, or customers? (Ranked)
- How useful was the event app? (Ranked)
- How did you hear about this event? (Open ended)
- How would you rate communication and information provided? (Ranked)
- How well-organized/scheduled was the event? (Ranked)
- How would you rate support from event/venue staff? (Ranked)
- Was there enough time to interact with guests, other speakers, and attendees in a non-formal setting? (Yes or no, but include an option to add more feedback)
- What was the best part of the event [in your role]? (Open ended)
- What could we have done to improve the experience? (Open ended)
- Did you receive any direct feedback from attendees? (Yes or no; if no, tailor the survey skip the sub-question below)
- If so, was the feedback positive or negative? (Multiple choice, including a follow up section that is open ended)
- How satisfied were you with the following?
- Venue (Ranked)
- Food (Ranked)
- Session length (Ranked)
- Entertainment (Ranked)
- Activities (Ranked)
- Were you successful in meeting your goals for the event? (Yes or no)
Gather Information Using Effective Post-Event Surveys
Many of the questions above can be tailored to the target audience to gauge their experience based on their role. The primary goal of a post-event survey should be to gather useful information in gauging the success of your event for all attendees (regardless of role) and to help you plan better for your next event.
Are you ready to plan a corporate event that returns amazing post-event survey results? Want to work with the team who can help you execute that plan? Get in touch with the Bishop-McCann team, and let’s get started today!