By connecting with your target audience at every stage of event organization, you not only simply capture critical feedbacks, but also build strong foundations for long-term communication with attendees. Whether it’s before, during, or after an event, you have to understand how to pick the right survey questions.
Why do you need to evaluate an event through surveys?
Evaluating an event through surveys is one of the most powerful engagement-building tactics available. Many event managers botch it up by focusing on surveys exclusively as follow-up activities. It’s imperative to realize that the measurement of attendance satisfaction at the post-event stage is only a part of the show. Here’s why you should embed surveys into your interactions with event guests at every stage of event organization:
- On-the-spot feedbacks. The first impression that you make on event guests is usually the most objective. Let people provide on-the-spot feedbacks to event activities, sessions, and check-in registration quality to tap into emotions in real-time.
- Cutting costs. With electronic event surveys, you can capture feedbacks easily without wasting printing or processing costs.
- Collect numbers. Event survey results, along with reporting outcomes, provide event specialists with numbers that can help secure fundings and establish partnerships in the future.
- Choose dialogue, not an interrogation. Communicate with your event persona at all three stages of the event set-up to give people a chance to interact with your brand, rather than answer questions.
The top questions to ask on your event survey
Strategic surveys are those that equip an event planner with valuable tools for performance improvement. To make it work, you should be quite picky about choosing the right questions to ask in a survey about an event.
Before the event: Getting to know the audience
No matter if you work with the same audience for years or convert new users constantly, getting to know how your event guests feel before the event is critical. The brilliant rule here: Leverage attendee segmentation to get hyper-targeted communication during the event. This means your event marketing becomes much more efficient if you personalize pre-event surveys for sponsors, event guests, partners, and speakers.
Check out some top-notch questions you can incorporate to your first event survey:
- What is your motivation for attending our event?
- How do you understand (“the theme”)?
- How did you discover our event?
- Who are the top three speakers you’re excited to hear at the event?
- Do you find the event location easily accessible?
During the event: Show must go on
The capabilities of chatbot messaging and real-time engagement tracking allow event managers to modify attendee experiences during the event. Build a mid-event survey that explores the moods of event guests, discovers their session and coffee preferences, and knows when they get hungry/bored.
Here are good event survey questions you can ask while the show’s still running:
- Please rate the ongoing session from 1 to 10
- Are you satisfied with the check-in?
- What speech/speaker has been the most insightful for you so far?
- Complete a coffee quiz: Mark the coffee stations you’ve visited at the venue on the map.
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how prepared was the speaker you’ve just listened to?
After the event: Reinforce your call-to-action
While the event is still fresh in the minds of your guests, connect to them and encourage them to talk about your event. Apart from collecting insights, post-event surveys have one more mission to accomplish. This is reinforcing your initial call-to-action by reminding people about a product/brand and asking them to act upon it. To make your post-event surveys as catchy as possible, add special promo codes, invitations to upcoming events, or some other lucrative offers.
The suggested questions you can embed in your post-event survey are the following:
- To what extent did the event meet your initial expectations?
- Was the staff polite/helpful?
- Rate the seating arrangements/audio-visual effects/lighting from 1 to 10.
- Were you satisfied with the speaker panel?
- Would you recommend attending our event to your friends? Why?
The best survey questions for events are those created by the people who tap into the minds of the target market. It doesn’t mean to be a successful event planner, you must have a Psychology degree. But, making a close acquaintance with the people who register/intend to register/might be interested in registering through surveys is necessary.
The event survey questions to avoid
It’s not only about the questions you should ask. Your success pretty much depends on not using the questions that will doom your survey to the trash bin. Here’s what you should avoid in an event survey:
- Long and vague questions ⇒ What do you think was the most important issue that the previous session brought up in the context of globalization and migration?
- Leading questions ⇒ How would you call your participation in the event? Was it successful or productive?
- The use of jargon ⇒ Did you receive bang for your buck by participating in this event?
Event survey examples and templates
Make people excited about filling out your event evaluation sheet to generate maximum feedbacks. Here are some juicy event evaluation samples that will help you catch their attention.
Branded event survey (Before the event)
You can employ ready-to-use templates which allow both incorporating your branding and personalizing the survey. Pick a maximum of 10 short questions that help start a dialogue and understand your target persona.
Visual recap + a survey question (After the event)
If you embed some photo/video elements into your post-event survey, it looks more catchy and helps attendees recall the event vibe and to provide the most objective feedbacks. In the end, people are excited to find themselves in the pics.
Mood analyzers (During the event)
Beyond Verbal has recently developed the new Moodies app that can recognize human emotions. With this AI breakthrough, you can tap into minds of your event guests during the event without bothering them with questions.
Conclusion
By taking good care of your event guests before, during, and after the event, you build more targeted communication with the audience. Pick the smart software that will help you automate survey management, think of clever questions for a survey about an event, and get going! You can utilize GEVME Survey to create personalized surveys for all event management stages.
