How to Create a Post-Event Evaluation Survey (With Examples)

Post-event evaluation survey is one of the key tools marketers use to gauge the guests' satisfaction levels, and the likelihood of them becoming warm leads.  

However, after the initial event hype dies down, getting the attendees to fill out your survey is challenging. 

Did they ignore it because it was boring? Was it the bad timing? Did you pick the right questions?

Let us whisk away your doubts with a useful guide to post-event evaluation surveys.

The Core Of A Post-Event Evaluation? Collecting Meaningful Data

Patching up and sending a generic post-event survey without providing any incentive for attendees to complete it — just because you’ve heard you’re supposed to?

Better not do it all. 

The main purpose of a post-event survey is to increase post-event engagement, learn what went well, and what needs to be improved for future events. If you’re allocating time, money, and other resources to creating post-event questionnaires, do it right!

Before you start making the survey, learn exactly what kind of data you need from the respondents. 

This will help you be super precise with questions, shorten the survey so it doesn’t bore the respondents and make them bail, and relieve you of managing the data that “could be useful”, but probably isn’t. 

Haphazardly-made surveys are a waste of time for everyone; a well-made one will help you make data-backed, informed decisions.

Types of Post-Event Evaluation Questions

To get a rich pool of high-quality quantitative and qualitative answers, we recommend mixing different types of questions, based on the data you seek and the types of answers guests can give:

1. Demographic questions

Demographic questions collect guests’ demographic information: gender, age (or age range), education level, employment status, approximate income, location, race/nationality/ethnicity, etc.

These questions are a great start to creating the ideal customer profile (ICP) and help you discover which demographic group responds the best to your messaging. 

2. Firmographic questions

Firmographic data relates to business and organizations as a whole. If you’re in B2B, the event guests will usually attend on behalf of their organizations, to learn how to improve the operations.

Firmographic questions reveal the information about:

• Type of industry;
• Company size;
• Employee count;
• Customer base (B2B, B2C, C2B, D2C, and others);
• Revenue;
• Expenditure;
• Location;
• Ownership;
• Growth data.

3. Open-ended questions

Open-ended survey questions let respondents answer in their own words on a blank line below.

There’s nothing better in terms of getting qualitative insights, but since the answers demand more effort to store and analyze, and are difficult to quantify, use them sparsely — especially if there were many guests at your event.

4. Multiple choice

Multiple-choice questions offer a couple of different options below, and respondents are to mark the choice (or choices) they agree with. The amount of answers depends on the topic and your particular event.

A great way to combine multiple choice and open-ended questions to get super-precise answers is to add the open-ended “Other - write below” option below the list of pre-selected answers.

Dropdown questions are a type of multiple-choice questions, with answers displayed in a drop-down list. This question form is usual for demographic information such as the age range of the respondents.

Multiple-choice questions are wonderfully versatile, and in some cases, your survey can be entirely comprised of this question type only.

5. Dichotomous (Yes/No or True/False) Questions

Self-explainatory; yes/no questions are great for respondent segmentation, and screening out the attendees who need not answer the survey (yet).

Some useful examples:

• Did you use our product before the event?
• Do you plan to attend our next event?

6. Likert scale

The Likert scale is used to measure feelings, opinions, and attitudes. 

Likert scale questions provide a range of choices from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”; the middle “neither agree nor disagree” option is the least helpful, so try to format the question in a way that elicits stronger feelings.

When you have a series of Likert scale questions, all with the same response options - these are Matrix questions. 

7. Rating scale

Rating scales let respondents express their feelings, satisfaction levels, or likelihood of performing a certain action on a scale — usually 1-5 or 1-10. 

It’s important to note which end of the scale means “not at all likely/satisfied” and which is “extremely likely/satisfied” — don’t assume you and the respondents think the same.

8. Rank-order questions

Rank-order questions let respondents list the answers in order of satisfaction, value, priority, or other criteria. 

For example:

Rank the following event elements from your favorite to least favorite - 1 being the best and 5 being the worst:

• Speakers
• Topics
• Q&A sessions
• Session length
• Venue

Rank-order questions are somewhat rare and take a bit more time to complete; however, they’re great for discovering the holistic view people have of your event or its aspects. Keep in mind that the answers don’t explain why they prefer one aspect over the other.

Don’t avoid rank-order questions, but use them wisely.

How Many Questions Should a Post-Event Survey Have?

Everyone’s “favorite” answer: it depends.

For events with plenty of things going on, lots of speakers, and different activities, it makes sense to create a longer survey. If the event is focused on one topic, you can go shorter. 

A research by Survey Monkey reveals important data:

• The more questions a survey has, the less time people will spend answering the questions. 
• Survey abandonment rates grow for surveys that take more than 7 minutes to complete.
• Event-related surveys have a median of 6-8 questions.

Here’s how to make the survey more palatable for the impatient respondents and increase the survey response rate:

• Good UX — Make it clear how long the survey will take, and implement a progress bar with either percentages, page numbers, or a visual scale. The survey should load without delay.
• Attendee segmentation — All questions probably won’t make the cut for every attendee. Adapt the list of questions to their job title, decision-making capabilities, the event segment they’ve attended, or other variable.
• Simplify your questions — Avoid ambiguous, loaded, and vague questions, double negatives, and expert jargon. Double-barrelled questions are the most frequent mistake, asking two questions in one (such as Were you satisfied with the event and the speakers?). 
• Provide good answering options — The answers should provide a variety of mutually exclusive options; to be safe, add “other” at the end when it makes sense.

11 Post-Event Survey Questions Examples

Here are some evergreen survey questions to get you started, and inspire you to create personalized post-event questionnaires for your guests!

1. What was your favorite part of the event?

• Question type: Open-ended or Multiple choice (select one answer)
• Purpose: Finding out which event segment was the most popular, to repeat it or build on it 

2. How did you hear about our event?

• Question type: Multiple choice (add Other as an option)
• Purpose: Finding out which promotion tactic was the most successful

3. What is the most important thing you’ve learned at our event?

• Question type: Open-ended question
• Purpose: Learning which part was the most memorable and important to the attendees

4. Are you satisfied with the speaker list from our event?

• Question type: Yes/no question
• Purpose: Determining whether the speaker quality was up to par, or the expectations weren’t met

5. How satisfied are you with the digital experience (for online events)

• Question type: Likert or Rating scale
• Purpose: Learning if your digital event infrastructure was good enough to carry out the event

6. Did you have any issues during the event livestream? (for online events)

• Question type: Yes/no question
• Purpose: Learning if there were any issues with your broadcast

7. Who would you like to see at our next event?

• Question type: Open-ended or Multiple choice question
• Purpose: Improving your future events with better guest-speakers, finding out who are the guests interested in

8. What can we do to improve in our future events?

• Question type: Open-ended questions
• Purpose: Finding out how to make the the events better

9. Rate the following statements on the scale from “Strongly agree to Strongly disagree”:

1. I’ve learned what I hoped to learn at this event
2. This event has helped me improve my knowledge on (insert topic)
3. The event was advertised correctly and there were no negative surprises

• Question type: Matrix questions
• Purpose: Learning if the event has met the expectations, and to what extent; measuring the overal satisfaction levels

10. How likely are you to attend our future events?

• Question type: Likert or Rating scale
• Purpose: Learning the overal attendee satisfaction with your event and getting a ballpark figure for the future event (estimated attendee number, venue size, resources, repeat visitors, etc)

11. How likely are you to recommend our product/service/event to your peers/coworkers?

• Question type: Likert or Rating scale
• Purpose: Calculating the Net Promoter Score® 

How To Motivate People To Complete The Surveys?

Once the event is complete, getting people to invest more time and effort into something that only benefits you is tricky. 

A foolproof way to keep the attendees on board is to create a valuable incentive with clear, visible benefits — like these:

• Gamification — A classic spin-the-wheel is still an engaging, fun, and widely used marketing tool with many applications. They can unlock the wheel by completing the post-event survey, and win some of the prizes.
• Gated content access — One of the most used ways to entice guests is to allow them access to beneficial resources after they complete the survey.
• Exclusive deals — Offer something rare and otherwise unavailable in return for a few more minutes of their time.
• Discounts and freebies — $$$ off for their next purchase, ideally your product/service, or tickets for your next event.
• Digital certificates and badges — Send them a certificate they can share on social media: that way, both you and your recipient gain more exposure in the industry, and they can attract new professional opportunities and job offers on top.

Learn how to create attractive post-event emails so these offers don’t go unnoticed!

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Main Takeaways

A post-event survey is the main asset for informed decision-making: be intentional, don’t make the survey just for the sake of it.

The survey should have a good hook, be precise, and provide something in return.

You need to provide a strong motive for people to respond — something attractive, highly exclusive, or profitable. 

Digital credentials tick all three boxes. 

Issuing digital certificates and badges awards you an entirely new marketing channel, with increased impression rates and loads of organic, honest testimonials.

Our digital credentialing tool is free to test: explore all features, or give us a call