55 event survey questions to collect actionable feedback

Collecting event feedback is crucial for organizers to understand needs, enhance future events, and guarantee satisfaction. You can fine-tune your strategy to deliver exceptional experiences by identifying what works and needs improvement.

Our guide will help you maximize the impact of your events by utilizing expert-written event survey questions.

An event survey is a questionnaire that gathers attendees' feedback about an event. Event surveys help stakeholders and event sponsors measure event success and attendee satisfaction and plan better events for the future. 

The most common event questionnaires are post-event surveys, but you can deploy surveys at any stage of an event.

To effectively capture event feedback, it’s important to ask the right event feedback survey questions. Use these 55 types of event survey question examples to build a comprehensive survey that collects meaningful responses from your attendees: 

Demographic questions are a part of the registration process, helping organizers and vendors tailor event content to the audience. They are typically quick multiple-choice questions, but you should consider letting event attendees skip them.

What specific aspects of your event delighted attendees? If it was a virtual event, did the virtual platform engage users? Were in-person attendees appropriately catered to? Attendee engagement is a contributing factor to future event attendance. Use these five post-event survey questions to create an engaging event experience.

Session-specific questions help you pinpoint positive and critical feedback about specific aspects of your event. Ask these session-specific questions to understand attendee satisfaction.

Content feedback survey questions can help identify strengths and weaknesses in content, including clarity, relevance, engagement, and overall impact. They also allow you to assess whether the content meets the needs and expectations of your target audience.

Are particular speakers popular? Should they appear at future events? To gather feedback, ask your attendees the following questions.

Logistics questions guide your decision-making on essential aspects such as venue selection, equipment needs, transportation arrangements, and scheduling. 

By asking logistic questions, you can ensure that all necessary resources are in place, you can anticipate potential challenges, and ensure every detail aligns with the event's objectives.

Engagement survey questions help organizations assess employee satisfaction, morale, and overall engagement within the workplace. Consider the following engagement questions in your next event survey.

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) are widely recognized metrics used to assess customer experience and satisfaction levels.

Together, these tools provide valuable insights into customer perceptions, preferences, and loyalty, allowing event organizers to identify improvement areas and enhance the overall event strategy. Use these satisfaction and NPS questions to gauge the success of your event.

Event organizers use multiple-choice questions to gather feedback quickly, especially with mid-event surveys where event attendees may be busy or using phones. Open-ended questions allow you to collect detailed feedback from actual attendees.

For example, if an attendee leaves negative feedback, you can follow up to understand their perspective. Check out these five open-ended questions to understand your quantitative feedback.

Don't guess the attendance of future events. Survey actual event attendees to understand how many will recommend or attend future events. This action will help you plan the logistics for your next event. Ask these post-event survey questions to plan future events.

Post-event feedback helps you improve future events. Deploy your post-event survey within 24 hours of the event's end so attendees can remember their experiences. 

Here are five post-event survey questions to ask to measure success.

Event survey questions are essential tools that help you effectively measure attendee satisfaction by gathering detailed event feedback.

Your colleagues report that the event was a resounding success, citing high energy and positive interactions throughout the day. However, several social media posts from attendees present a contrasting view, raising concerns. 

To determine the true sentiment and success of the event, conducting comprehensive post-event surveys is essential.

Pre-event surveys are an effective tool for gathering audience preferences, allowing organizers to understand what attendees are most interested in.

Who is planning to attend your event? It’s important to identify who will be there, who cannot participate, and their reasons for absence.

Events are inherently resource-intensive undertakings, requiring significant time, money, and human capital investments. Demonstrating a positive return on investment (ROI) is crucial, as it justifies the resources allocated to these events and builds a compelling business case for securing additional support in future initiatives.

For instance, if a previous event resulted in 10 sales-qualified leads, you can quantify this achievement by detailing the conversion rates from leads to actual sales, which may further illustrate the event's impact on overall business revenue goals.

Addressing survey feedback is one of the most crucial steps in the survey research process. Analyzing the feedback collected from participants can provide valuable insights into their preferences, experiences, and expectations. 

This understanding empowers you to design more engaging events that align with your audience’s needs.

Related reading: 7 highly effective ways to elevate buyer trust

Pre-event surveys help you understand your audience's expectations and preferences. They are asked before the event to gather key data on demographics, session preferences, and logistical needs, ensuring a more engaging and satisfying experience.

Asking the right pre-event survey questions can help you learn what attendees want from the event, such as networking events, educational sessions, or entertainment.

Pre-event questions:

This attendee feedback is invaluable for customizing content, choosing relevant speakers, and planning activities that resonate with your audience. 

You can quickly gather this information using a general event feedback survey template to expedite the survey design process.

Mid-event surveys provide real-time feedback for immediate improvements. Mid-event surveys make it possible to fine-tune the event as it happens, leading to higher satisfaction and a more successful event.

This data helps you enhance the attendee experience during the event. For example, you can use live surveys to monitor engagement and satisfaction for immediate event adjustment. 

During-event survey questions:

Post-event surveys help you assess the success of your event and measure attendee satisfaction. This feedback is crucial for identifying areas you must change to improve future events. For example, you can learn if the content met expectations, the venue was suitable, or the event staff was helpful.

Feedback from post-event surveys also helps build trust with your attendees. When you act on their suggestions, you show that you value their experience. Implementing changes based on feedback increases the likelihood of repeat attendance and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Post-event survey questions:

A good survey provides you with actionable insights from your respondents. But you won’t get valuable feedback by slapping together questions, especially for event surveys. Here are five tips to create better event surveys.

This is a best practice for surveys in general, but it’s especially important when it comes to event surveys. Attendees are doing you a favor by filling out this survey, so you have to be respectful of their time. Try to limit yourself to five questions and stick to the essentials.

Use an open-ended question or two to ask for general feedback or ideas, but keep the rest of your survey (especially the logistical questions) to multiple-choice questions with an “other” option. However, event feedback will spare you these types of fire drills in the future.

If you need to ask more than five questions, use skip logic whenever possible to ensure that respondents only see questions that are relevant to them—don’t ask them whether they liked the salad at lunch and learn if they didn’t come.

Yes, you want as much event feedback as possible, but requiring answers to every single question means that your respondents will have to complete every question on the page for you to see any of their responses.

Don’t make any of the questions “required” if you can help it. Any data you gather is good, and even if people skip a few questions, you’ll still get input from their other responses.

The exception to this is questions that use skip logic to randomly select people from different versions of the survey based on their responses. You’ll need to make these questions required, so try to keep them early in the survey. 

Speaking of keeping things early in the survey, here’s another best practice: 

For most events, this is a broad question about attendee satisfaction, like:

Put the first, broad question on its own page before getting into the specifics. When respondents click “next,” SurveyMonkey captures and logs the answer, so even if they lose interest halfway through and don’t complete the survey, you’ll still get data on your most important question.

Put the questions that are hardest to answer last. It’s better to get incomplete data from a wide range of participants who answer your first couple of questions than fully completed event surveys from fewer people.

You’ll also want to create an intuitive flow for your event surveys, grouping questions by topic so that people can understand and respond more quickly and easily. For instance, you might have a few questions about event content on one page and a few questions about logistics on the next.

Save any questions about demographics for the very last page. Although they are less important than your actual event feedback data, they can be useful for filtering and identifying trends.

Don’t simply link to your survey in your post-event email. Instead, embed your first question in the email itself. Email is generally your primary means of communication with attendees, and embedding your survey directly into your email makes it easier for them to answer quickly without following a link. This will increase your response rates and accuracy.

A SurveyMonkey study found a 22% increase in survey opens when the survey’s first question was right in the email. Not only are people more likely to open a survey that teases the first question, but they’re also 20% more likely to finish the entire survey.

People with strong opinions about your event—whether they loved or hated it—are more likely to take your survey and vent those passionate feelings. But to get really robust insights, you need more than that.

You need more responses, and you need more moderate responses. It's important to include that middle group that liked your event just okay. You can convert them to superfans if you listen closely to their feedback.

To inspire the less-passionate folks to respond, structure your survey in a way that makes answering as easy as possible (short, multiple choice, etc.) and make sure to include Likert scale questions (a scale of answer options typically ranging from “Strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”) to give moderates a chance to voice their opinions accurately.

Related reading: Sample survey questions and examples

Analyzing survey responses helps you turn raw data into actionable insights to improve event experiences. Consider the following tips and suggestions for analyzing event survey feedback at every stage.

To analyze pre-event survey data properly, start by segmenting respondents. Breaking large data sets into more manageable groups helps you identify issues and concerns.

You can also identify key concerns across all respondents using Sentiment Analysis. Sentiment Analysis uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to read through and categorize open-ended responses as positive, neutral, or negative. The analysis shows the distribution of these categories, helping you understand how your respondents feel.

Finally, allocate resources appropriately according to the responses. You may discover that dietary restrictions apply to most of your attendees. You have the opportunity (and responsibility) to make accommodations that ensure attendee comfort.

Here’s how you deploy and respond to a pre-event survey:

You may find that professionals from large organizations can only attend sessions between 9 AM and 12 PM. Attendees from smaller organizations, 10-50 people, have the flexibility to participate in full-day events. Based on your goals and target audience, you should find ways to accommodate attendees from large organizations. 

You can collect data in real-time mid-event feedback by distributing surveys via QR codes post-presentation to measure session satisfaction or text messages during breaks to track engagement.

Use simple metrics, such as Likert scale questions, to measure attitudes or opinions on a scale, typically ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.

The great thing about mid-event surveys is that you can immediately make changes.

Let’s take a look at mid-event surveys in action:

You can't change the speaker lineup or venue, but you can adjust the temperature, sound quality, and seating arrangements. This proactive approach keeps attendees comfortable and engaged.

Mid-event surveys make it possible to fine-tune the event as it happens, leading to higher satisfaction and a more successful event.

After an event, use statistical analysis, charts, and graphs to make sense of the data.

For example, after an event, cross-tabulation can be used to compare the feedback of different attendee groups to reveal specific areas for improvement. Remember the most important step in data analysis: take action.

Consider this real-world scenario:

After a large industry conference, 75% of attendees expressed satisfaction with the event overall, but only 50% were satisfied with the breakout sessions.

Through follow-up questions, the organizers discovered that the session topics were too broad. They used this insight to tailor future sessions to more specific interests, leading to higher satisfaction in subsequent events.

Once you've analyzed the data, act on the insights. If attendees report issues with event logistics, such as poor sound quality, prioritize fixing these for future events.

Share the improvements with attendees to show you value their feedback. Acting on feedback builds trust and encourages higher engagement and satisfaction at your next event.

Effective event surveys at every stage, including pre-event, mid-event, and post-event, are crucial for gathering valuable event feedback and improving your event marketing strategy. 

With a wide range of event survey templates, SurveyMonkey makes creating and analyzing surveys easy, providing you with the data to enhance every aspect of your event, from registration to post-event evaluations. Sign up for free to start building event surveys with SurveyMonkey today.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.