Your event’s success relies on a lot more than profit margins and revenues. Even if you reached your financial goals, your conference brand is dead in the water if your attendees had a bad experience, and walked away without their expectations met.
When you’re assessing post-event mood, qualitative metrics are valuable. Qualitative feedback is based on opinions and preferences rather than cold, hard facts. This type of feedback can help you stay ahead of trends and avoid losing unhappy attendees before it’s too late.
The best place to start? A post-event survey.
These surveys are crucial to evaluating — and improving — your event. Even if you sold out, you can’t call your event a success if your attendees aren’t satisfied.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Nothing is more crucial than making sure your attendees have a great time” user=”@eventbrite”]
But before you send your survey off, make sure you’re asking the right questions.
Ask the right questions
Start with an easy, straightforward question like “How would you rate this event?” that prompts respondents to rate their experience on a scale of one to five, with one being the most important.
From here, move into questions specific to your event and the data you’re hoping to collect. For example, if networking is a big part of your events, you could ask attendees whether they made any valuable new contacts. You could also ask which sessions and experiences they enjoyed the most.
One of the most common ways event organizers end surveys is with a question that leads to a “Net Promoter Score.” On a scale of 1 to 10, ask whether event-goers would be likely to recommend this event to someone else. Those who rank high (9 or 10) are “promoters.” Those who rank low (6 or below) are “detractors.” And in the middle are “passive respondents.” This type of information is useful for two reasons:
- It tells you how likely people are to spread the word and attend again.
- If you keep track of who is answering the survey, you find out who your most enthusiastic supporters are. These are people you could consider cultivating brand ambassador relationships with to boost your social media marketing.
Of course, you’re hoping for all promoters, but it might not always be the case.
While nobody likes negative feedback, passive respondents and detractors are often more useful than your promoters, because they let you know what to do differently next time. They can also give you insight into who you are marketing your event to. Sometimes, surveys reveal that you should be cultivating a different crowd.
Boost your results
You can ask questions, but you can’t make people answer. Even the best survey tools and most intelligent questions won’t guarantee you results. To ensure that you get the most feedback from your survey, there are a few best practices to abide by.
- Do it quickly — within 24 hours of your event.
- Make it easy. Your survey should be short and easy to fill out in minutes.
- Make it flexible. Don’t insist they answer every single question — just the ones they find relevant.
- Offer an incentive. With a content or a straight up gift to anyone who responds, you can offer things like first-right tickets for next year or gift cards to online stores.
- Let them be anonymous. You want truthful feedback, so lower the barrier for people who have something to say, but don’t necessarily want to own it.
Choose the right tool
Post-event surveys, also called exit surveys, ask attendees for their feedback while events are still fresh in their minds. There are plenty of online tools on the market to help you get a survey out quickly, and that’s a testament to how important surveys are to gauging consumer satisfaction.
SurveyMonkey, for instance, has more than 300 pre-written survey templates that can get you started figuring out just what to ask. Four of those templates are specifically geared toward events, so you don’t need to worry about weeding through all of them.
And SurveyMonkey’s templates let you custom-create surveys from 15 different types of questions. Using a mix of multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, ordinal scales and other types of questions will help you get more robust and useful responses.
The most bang for your buck
If your ticketing platform has integrations with other technologies, you can combine and simplify your marketing and metrics efforts.
For instance, you can use a ticketing partner to gather data on who is buying tickets to your events, a survey tool to conduct exit polls, and an email-marketing partner to send follow-up emails to attendees. If all of these tools can be managed directly within one platform (like Eventbrite), it becomes infinitely easier to manage everything.
If you would like a more in-depth look into your attendee sentiment, check out Beyond Registration: Using Data to Supercharge Your Event. In it, you’ll learn how to gauge attendee’s interest more accurately with a mobile event app — and predict their interests before your event, too.
