As an event organizer, gauging how well your event went can be tricky, especially when everything goes smoothly. If you achieve all of your event to-dos, the event will almost certainly be perfect from your perspective, but this may not be true for the attendees.

Event evaluation surveys enable you to understand what people loved and disliked about your events, it also tells you how to improve them. However, event evaluation surveys are only effective if you ask the right questions.

In this article, we’ll go over what event evaluation surveys are, how to design great ones, and the top questions to ask for quality responses from attendees.

What are Event Evaluation Surveys?

Event evaluation surveys are important for all types of events, including seminars, business conferences, birthday parties, weddings, concerts, and more. So, regardless of the type of event you plan, event evaluation surveys allow you to collect feedback from event attendees and use it to improve future events.

Typically, event evaluation surveys ask what the audience liked about the event and how it can be improved. So, it’s usually a mix of multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions that allow attendees to express their opinions about the event and what could be done better.

Also, event evaluation surveys do not always have to be about the flaws in your event strategy; sometimes the feedback enables you to gather new event planning ideas. Open-ended questions allow respondents to fully express themselves, allowing them to come up with some ideas on what you can do to improve future events.

Importance of Conducting a Post-event Evaluation?

The main benefit of conducting event evaluation surveys is that it helps measure event success by measuring attendees’ satisfaction. Collecting post-event feedback also helps you improve future events by identifying what went wrong with the events and how to fix them.

Besides post-event evaluation surveys, there are other ways to assess event success, such as event planning KPIs. However, understanding how attendees felt about the events is a more effective way to determine how well the event went.

Event evaluation surveys also help you identify the event’s strong points so that you can capitalize on them in future events. For example, you hosted a birthday party with fantastic decor and food, but the music was a bit sloppy. 

With an evaluation survey, you’ll find out why your attendees weren’t totally satisfied; with the music. So, to increase your attendees’ satisfaction at your next event, find out their music preferences and instruct the DJs to create a playlist that fits it.

Here are some other reasons why you should conduct post-event evaluation surveys:

Developing Relationships

Inquiring about your attendees’ thoughts about events demonstrates that you are interested in their experience. This helps build trust and a long-term relationship with you, increasing your chances of being contacted for future events.

Actionable Insights

Obsessing over KPIs may lead to you judging yourself far too harshly and may prevent you from identifying your event’s flaws. Evaluation surveys help you pinpoint attendees’ pain points, that have an impact on the performance and revenue generated from your events.

Performance Review

Comparing your event’s success over time allows you to see whether your event’s performance is improving or deteriorating. For example, if the satisfaction level for the previous wedding reception you hosted was 7 and the most recent is 9, your event performance has improved.

Improve Event Strategy for Future Events

Working with event evaluation surveys enables you to plan for the future based on feedback from attendees. It also helps improve their experience, which increases their satisfaction.

For example, you can optimize the registration experience using insights from previous event evaluation surveys. Another example is training event staff to be more helpful and welcoming to attendees, and improving event staff based on feedback from attendees.

Tips for Event Satisfaction Surveys

The event evaluation survey insights enable you to eliminate the negative aspects of your event strategy and amplify the positive aspects to increase attendee satisfaction.

However, you will only know what changes to make to your event strategy if you collect quality feedback. Quality feedback is actionable responses that help you optimize your strategy to increase attendees’ satisfaction.

So, here are some pointers to help you build event evaluation surveys to collect quality responses from attendees:

• Verify Respondents’ Details

Asking the right people is the first step toward a successful post-event evaluation survey. Make sure that your survey pool only includes event attendees.

You can accomplish this by sending the survey only to those who checked in at the event venue. If you don’t have a check-in system, you can also use the list of contacts that RSVPed for the event.

• Timing Is Important

You shouldn’t wait too long to contact attendees about the events; the best time is a day or two after the event has ended, while the memory is still fresh. 

Attendees are more likely to tell you how they saw the event accurately if you ask them immediately after the event. If you wait too long, the event details may have blurred in the minds of the attendees, making it difficult to gather insights that will help you plan better events.

Also, collecting attendees’ opinions is a good way for them to vent rather than give you negative reviews. They are less likely to give you very negative reviews if they believe their opinions are being heard and you intend to improve your services based on their responses.

• Evaluate Speakers/Instructors

Evaluate how the speaker interacted with their audience if they were speakers or instructors at the event.

For example, you hosted an employee training event and the attendees found the training to be boring. The next step is to advise the tutor to engage the audience more with relatable examples in future events to engage the audience.

You could also consider hiring another tutor to provide a better experience for the audience.

Mobile-optimized poll

Making your event evaluation survey mobile-friendly makes it more accessible. Most people are unlikely to open their PC to take the survey, so developing the survey for mobile improves the respondent experience with your brand.

Mobile-friendly surveys also make it easier to collect participant feedback; if your potential respondents are unable to access the survey or have a negative experience, they will most likely abandon it.

• Attractive Survey Design

Aside from making feedback surveys mobile-friendly so that attendees can easily access them, you should also pay attention to the aesthetics. Create surveys that are appealing to your target audience so that they are more engaged with the survey.

Creating visually appealing surveys isn’t just about the graphics; adding funny memes and images can also make them more engaging. Another way to make surveys more appealing is to write them in a friendly and engaging tone.

The survey design should also reflect your brand image so that the participant has a mental image of your brand while taking it.

• Thank Your Respondents

Thanking attendees for taking the time to fill out the surveys shows how much you value their time. 

The thank you message should come before and at the end of the survey. It should also be short and simple.

For example, if it’s a fundraising event, you can tell them how much you raised and how they contributed to the event’s success as an introductory thank you.

You can also take advantage of the opportunity to show them the photos or videos you took from the event and express your gratitude for their participation.

• Reward Respondents

Most of the time, simply thanking your participants isn’t enough; you also need to make your surveys stand out by offering incentives to the participants. People get a lot of emails, if you’re providing incentives, you might get a low response rate.

You can reward participants by giving them gift cards or a discount on your next event ticket. Even if they do not attend the event, they will most likely transfer their ticket to a friend or family member, increasing the number of people who attend your future events.

• Promote Your Next Event

Make the most of your event satisfaction survey by inviting attendees to your next event or asking them to sign up for promotional messages for future events.

For example, you could end the survey with a question like “Would you like to attend more events like this?” or “Would you like to be notified of more future events like this?”

Potential Questions to Evaluate an Event

Here are 20 questions to ask attendees about your event went and get quality feedback:

• How did you hear about this event?

• Friends/ Family
• Social Media
• Event directory
• Colleagues
• Other (Specify)

• Was this the first time at an event hosted by us?

• Yes
• No

• Why did you decide to attend this event?

• On a scale of 1 to 7, how likely are you to recommend this event to friends/family? (Where 7 is very likely and 1 is not very likely)

• How would you rate the food and drinks at the event?

• Very good
• Good
• Acceptable
• Bad
• Terrible

• What did you like most about the event?

• Live Performance
• Food/drinks
• Decor
• Others (Specify)

• What was the least favorite thing about the event?

• How hospital were the staff at the event?

• Very hospitable
• Hospitable
• Mildly hospital
• Cold
• Very cold

• What session of the event did you enjoy most?

•  Rate your satisfaction with the duration of the event.

• Perfect
• Very good
• Acceptable
• Long
• Too long

• How easy was it to find all the information you need about the event?

• Very easy
• Easy
• Not too easy or difficult
• Difficult
• Very Difficult

• Did the event meet your expectations?

• Yes
• Barely
• No

•  Rate your satisfaction with the activities (music, speech, performance, etc) at the event.

• Extremely Satisfied
• Satisfied
• Average
• Dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

•  Did you learn anything new at the event?

• Yes
• No

•  How interactive was the training session?

• Very interactive
• Interactive
• Average
• Not Interactive
• Extremely non-interactive

•  Did you meet anyone you’d like to stay in contact with anyone you met at the networking event?

• Yes
• No

•  What would you like us to improve about the event?

• Do you think the event achieved its goals

• Yes
• No

•  How satisfied were you with the event, overall?

• Extremely satisfied
• Satisfied
• Neutral
• Dissatisfied
• Extremely dissatisfied

•  What are your suggestions to help us improve future events?

Conclusion

Post-event evaluation surveys gauge your audience’s satisfaction with the event. It identifies the activities or strategies to eliminate or improve to increase attendee satisfaction.

Event evaluation surveys also allow you to accurately assess your event’s audience’s expectations and how to meet those expectations by incorporating their suggestions.