Finding out what your attendees thought of your event is essential if you wish to develop and improve your offering for the future.
Post-event surveys highlight the wins and losses and offer an opportunity to re-engage with attendees in future events.
Beyond gathering constructive attendee feedback, post-event surveys can reinforce the ultimate call-to-action (CTA), encouraging attendees to donate, network, purchase, share aspects of the event they enjoyed or did not… whatever the goal may be.
Who to ask?
- Attendees are the obvious ones. Given these are the people you produced the event for, it makes sense you want to know about their experience.
- Event volunteers, If you worked with volunteers during your event, they are a great source to learn what worked and what didn’t.
- Event sponsors, Just like event attendees, sponsors are also critical to your event’s success. With an understanding of that, it makes sense you want their feedback too!
How to Create an Effective survey?
- Keep it short
While you want to obtain granular feedback that is enough to be useful, you don’t want to scare off respondents with too many questions. We’re all busy and no one wants to spend 20 minutes completing a survey no matter how engaged they are.
Figure out the feedback that will be most valuable and keep questions to an absolute minimum. A maximum of 10 questions will ensure the highest completion rates.
- Stick to multiple-choice answers
These questions are easier for respondents to answer and provide you with quantitative data to use in your analysis.
- Create a narrative
The questions should follow a natural order, leading respondents through your survey like a story.
- Consider including a survey incentive
If you’re keen on getting a lot of responses, an incentive in some form can prove helpful. Potential incentives range from entering respondents into sweepstakes drawing to giving respondents a gift card if they answer all of your questions.
- Stay away from asking double-barreled questions
Double-barreled questions are when you ask for feedback on two separate things within a single question.
Here’s an example:
“How would you rate the quality of our product and support?”
- Send it quickly
To get the best possible response rate, you need to act fast. Send your survey within 24 hours of the end of the event to capture attendees while they are still engaged, and everything is still fresh in their minds.
How can the surveys be distributed?
Once you’ve designed your event survey, how you deliver it is the next big question. Here are some ways:
Conclusion
For the event organizer, attendee feedback is gold, so don’t miss your opportunity to prospect for it.
What do you do with the feedback you receive?
Using summary reports, survey analytics, Salesforce dashboards, or all of the above, you can track and analyze survey results to create a follow-up plan.
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