Design Event Survey Questions To Evaluate Event Success

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For an event organizer or a company evaluating the events, help you learn from the mistakes and highlights to organize better events. You might be pleased with the event, however, experiences vary. 

Organizing an event, whether virtual or public, is a complex endeavor that involves meticulous planning and execution. To truly understand the impact of your efforts and continuously improve, it’s crucial to gather feedback from your audience. Event survey questions play a pivotal role in this process, offering insights into attendee experiences, preferences, and areas for enhancement. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the importance of event survey questions, different question types, intents behind surveying, and steps to conduct an impactful post-event survey.

What are event survey questions?

It is a common understanding that you need to keep receiving feedback to keep improving. When you know what people think about your past events, and areas in which they’d want to be changed and improved, you get to see new perspectives towards your events and make people’s experience even better. 

When it comes to post-event feedback, receiving negative feedback is just as important as receiving positive feedback. You should always look out for what is lacking in your event and what people expect instead. Get to know the bits where they enjoyed the event and the parts where they thought could’ve been better.  

Statistically, 90% of virtual event organizations use event feedback surveys to better understand satisfaction among the event attendees. To gather insightful responses, you will need to create a survey with different questions. Let’s look at the various question types you can utilize.

Types of event survey questions

Event survey questions can be in any form; the one which best suits the topic needs to be put efficiently. You can see survey questions in the following forms: 

Open-ended – allowing respondents to express their views in brief and share their honest opinion.  

Close-ended – yes/no or multiple choice questions allow attendees to express their satisfaction without the need for details. 

Rating scales – scales that range from 1-5, 1-10, etc., allow you to measure how likely your guests are to recommend the event to others. 

Slider questions – a sliding bar where the respondents slide the answer bar from negative to positive, allowing you to estimate your guests’ level of satisfaction with the event. 

File upload – ask respondents to upload images, pdf, videos, or other files as answers.  

Demographic questions – gather personal information from the people to segment the audience and observe answering patterns. 

Matrix/grid – this question is in a table format where rows have various questions and columns have common answer options. Respondents can complete various sub-questions in a single one. 

Leverage online survey tools that support a wide range of question types to design interactive event surveys.

Read how Voxco helped the C2 Montréal team combine online and on-the-floor attendees' insights.

“Our collaboration with Voxco has been a big success.” Pierre Noinski, Director of Participant Services

The importance of event survey questions

For event organizers and companies alike, evaluating events through surveys is a powerful tool for learning from both successes and mistakes. While you may be pleased with the event, diverse perspectives exist among attendees. Surveys provide an opportunity to capture valuable insights, refine future events, and enhance overall participant experience.

Gathering feedback from attendees after a virtual or public event can help you understand what you lacked during this event. You can plan better and improve the next event with the help of key insights. 

Event survey questions help you to evaluate the success of the event and gather insights on every detail that you may have missed. 

01. Asking your audience about their satisfaction and experience with the event shows that you care about their time and effort. It helps build trust when they see you being curious about what they think and feel. 

02. The feedback helps you uncover which aspect of the event has been a success, a failure, or a mediocre experience for the event attendees. It removes the guesswork and assumptions and gives you hard facts to work with. 

03. The praise and criticism from attendees help you improve future events. It allows you to understand what needs more attention and what is audience favorite, thus allowing you to refine future events. 

Giving the attendees an opportunity to voice out their opinions allows you to understand the best, the worst, and the overall satisfaction. 

Related read: Why are surveys important?

The 3 intents of the event survey questions

With each question you ask, you gather valuable insights to deliver better experiences at future events. Even survey questions can thus help you gather insights on three types of objectives. 

→ The best or highlights of the event:

  • Ask attendees about the best parts of the event to understand what contributed to its success.
  • Use insights to repeat successful elements in future events.

→ The bad part of the event – Addressing Issues:

  • Explore aspects that led to low satisfaction scores to identify failures and areas for improvement.
  • Uncover what needs modification or removal in future events.

→ Measuring Overall Satisfaction:

  • Gauge overall satisfaction to determine whether attendees would recommend the event to others.
  • Understand the reasons behind high and low satisfaction levels to inform future planning.

Looking for the perfect survey software?

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20 Event survey question examples

1. How satisfied are you with the event? 

2. Which moment or experience did you enjoy the most? 

3. What are the areas you want us to improve? 

4. How was the event helpful to you?  

5. Do you think the event met your expectations?  

6. How likely are you to attend our future events? 

7. How likely are you to recommend our event to your friends and family? 

8. Did you find the event interactive? 

9. Were your questions or problems solved at the event? 

10. What was the reason for you attending this event? 

11. Where did you get to know about this event? 

12. Have you attended this event before? 

13. Will you attend this event again in the future? 

14. Have you attended any other of our events? 

15. How satisfied are you with the quality of the content? 

16. How helpful was the staff at the event? 

17. How satisfied are you with the virtual organization? 

18. What were your favorite virtual features? 

19. Tell us about your least favorite experience of the event. 

20. What is your takeaway from the event?

Use robust survey software that helps you design customized surveys with the brand logo, advanced logic, various question types, and in multiple languages.

Event survey questions: Who should be the audience?

Who should be the participants for your event survey questions? The attendees are not the only answer. You should also collect feedback from the team members or volunteers who helped you arrange the event. 

Attendees

For obvious reasons, you should gather feedback from the people the event is meant for. Collecting audience feedback on their experience and satisfaction during and after the event helps you understand how well you have organized the event. 

With their responses, you can understand what impressed them and what might make them unwilling to attend any future events by your company. So an event survey can be the key to ensuring a successful event at all times. 

Team members/Volunteers:

Gathering feedback from your team and volunteers can give you an additional perspective. It can help you uncover innovative ideas on what could’ve been done differently. Internal opinion can help you identify new and different ideas to try at different events to deliver a better audience experience. 

Acquiring insights from internal and external perspectives can help you create a clear image of all the details of the event. Event survey questions can throw light on all aspects of the events that you may need to improve. This way, you can improve your strategy and enhance the audience experience.

See Voxco survey platform in action

Take a guided tour of our platform with our on-demand survey demos. Explore our survey platform in short videos.

How to conduct an event survey: 4 steps

Now that we are towards the end of the article let’s discuss how you can conduct an event survey to gather actional insights. 

1. Collect attendee information during registration:

Make sure to gather contact information such as email and phone numbers from attendees when they are signing up for the event. This will allow you to send communications before the event, survey after the event, and follow up for any other necessity. 

2. Consider the question types to use & mistakes to avoid:

Your questions must be perfectly curated to gather valuable insights from the attendees. We have shared the various survey question types you can use in your survey. However, here’s a short list of mistakes to avoid when writing your event survey questions.

Don’t phrase questions in a way that sways respondents to answer on one side. Your questions should not sound persuasive.

Speak in layman’s language. Avoid using jargon or acronyms that may confuse the respondent. 

Don’t ask two questions in a single survey question. 

Allow respondents to skip the question or choose not to answer. Don’t make questions compulsory. 

3. Consider the time for sending the post-event survey:

It’s best to send the survey when the memory is still fresh. Prepare your event survey question beforehand and send it out within 24 hours of the event. This way, you can gather accurate insights from the attendees immediately. 

4. Close the loop with respondents:

Follow-up with all the respondents. Use the opportunities to learn more from the respondents about what they liked or disliked about the event. Voxco allows you to follow up and close the loop with respondents immediately with a customized email. 

Feedback is the best way to measure your target audience’s satisfaction with the event, so you can improve your future event marketing and attract more attendees.

Trusted by 500+ global brands to gather, measure, uncover, and act on insights.

Conclusion

Crafting effective event survey questions is a strategic process that involves understanding your goals, audience, and the intricacies of event planning. By incorporating thoughtful pre-event, during-event, and post-event survey questions, you can gather comprehensive data to evaluate the success of your event. Use the feedback collected to refine future events, enhance participant experience, and ultimately achieve your event objectives. Remember, a successful event is not just about what happens on the day but also about the lasting impact it leaves on attendees.

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