Q. How do you know what attendees thought of your event? A. You ask them.

Event surveys, session evaluations, and polls are crucial for understanding event hits and misses. However, event survey responses are only as good as the questions that come before them.

Making sure you ask the right questions in the right way will ensure you get meaningful answers.

Best Practice

Event survey best practices are all about keeping it brief, clear and relevant:

1.Aim for short questions. With post-event survey response rates below the 10% mark, you need to work smart to encourage completion. Respondents are invariably time poor and will lose interest in dense and overly long questions.

2.Keep the survey interesting by varying question types. Multiple-choice, matrices and yes/no options are great for decisive responses. Think carefully about essay type responses – use only when strictly necessary.

3.Make sure there’s one question that asks for an overall event rating. It will provide you with a good overview of the event’s success or otherwise.

4.Post event surveys should have no more than 12 questions. Polls and session evaluations should be five or fewer.

5.Tailor questions. Respondents are more likely to engage with surveys that are relevant to them. If they were only at the event’s morning session, try to avoid asking them what they thought about the vegetarian lunch option.

6.Think about language. It’s easy to fall into the trap of posing a leading question. It may be unwittingly, but influencing responses will produce unreliable results.

7.Stay specific. What pressing issues do you need to address? What are your organisation’s hot topics? Keeping your priorities front and centre when compiling questions helps to avoid general questions that are too broad to be useful.

8.In a world that is in love with visuals, think about how you will present survey results. Data that can populate graphs, pie charts and infographics makes the information easier to understand and more meaningful for you and your team .

Conclusion

Event surveys are a vital part of an event planner’s tool-kit. Taking time to draft smart, thoughtful questions that encourage maximum response rates will yield great results.

This is an edited version of a post from our good friends at EventMobi. You can read the original here.