What do your attendees think about your event? How about sponsors? Are they likely to support your event next year? What was the experience like for in-person versus virtual attendees at your hybrid event?
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The best event teams are laser-focused on asking a mix of event survey questions to gather essential qualitative and quantitative data through feedback from key stakeholders. By doing so, you can improve key engagement metrics and other event outcomes, like:
If you’re looking to optimize your event strategy and deliver even more engaging event experiences, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ve compiled 51 must-ask event survey questions that you can paste directly into your post-event surveys to gain crucial insights into the attendee, sponsor, and employee experience.
By the end of the piece, you’ll learn the questions you can ask using audience engagement software that will help you gather honest opinions from attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, and speakers — and how you can use that data to measure success, identify areas of improvement, and ultimately enhance your overall event strategy.
But first, here’s a brief overview of how we’ve categorized our event survey questions:
Before we jump into the questions, we’ll explain a bit of the basics: what event surveys are, their key objectives, and the different types of event survey questions you can ask.
Also, we’ve included a post-event report template you can use to easily incorporate the feedback you gather alongside your other findings, observations, and recommendations.
Ready? Let’s go!
Event surveys are questionnaires designed to collect feedback from your attendees and can include a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. You can send surveys to participants before, during, or after the event, and they are often shared digitally. Any person who interacted with your event should receive a survey because sponsors, attendees, and your event staff will all have unique perspectives on different aspects of your event.
Successful event strategies depend on stakeholder satisfaction and event surveys are one of the best ways to measure this. Whether your goal is to build a case for pitching event sponsors, to create a great virtual event experience, or to improve attendee experience on the fly, event surveys lift the curtain and give organizers insight into how attendees feel.
An event survey’s main objective is to gather valuable feedback for your post-event analysis, helping you refine future events and achieve your KPIs. It’s an essential step in understanding what resonated with your audience and what needs to be improved.
By leveraging event management software, surveys streamline post-event reporting and provide actionable insights for future planning. Specifically, post-event surveys help you:
After collecting survey data, you need to analyze it to identify trends and organize key metrics. We’re sharing this free post-event report template to give you more time to spend on analysis instead of figuring out how to present the data to your team. Use it to make post-event analysis more efficient and impactful.
There are several different ways that you can pose questions to stakeholders. Here are some of the more common types of questions you’ll want to ask your audience:
Below, we’ll indicate whether each question functions best as an NPS, yes-no, or open-ended qualitative question. These question type suggestions are just that — suggestions. It’s up to you to determine the best use for your event survey.
Rating scale questions are a popular survey tool that allows participants to rate their experience or satisfaction on a numerical scale—like 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. These questions provide quantifiable data that’s easy to analyze and compare. For example, you might ask attendees to rate their satisfaction with event content, with 1 being “Very Dissatisfied” and 5 being “Very Satisfied.”
There are several ways to approach rating scale questions, including:
Rating scale questions are also key for calculating Net Promoter Score, measuring attendee loyalty by asking, “How likely are you to recommend this event?”
Now that you have a better understanding of the basics of event surveys, read on to see 51 great event survey questions and how they can help you better evaluate your event.
Question Type: NPS
Survey questions like this one are pretty straightforward. It’s a good starting point for the questions that follow and allows you to get the big picture idea of how the event went in general and if it met expectations. A best practice in event surveys is to start off more general and get more granular towards the end.
Question Type: Open-ended
Questions like this help you get an idea of what is worth repeating for future iterations of the event. Keep track of each point and tally the times it was mentioned. Rank them from most votes to least and prioritize the winners next year.
Question Type: Open-ended
Although you may be hesitant to ask this question, knowing your shortcomings allows you to learn from them. Don’t write a survey that forces respondents to leave a glowing review. Instead, show them how much you value their opinion and display those changes at your next event.
Question Type: NPS
This one is very important because it reveals how enthusiastic the survey participant is about your event. Compare these numbers to the actual number of attendees returning next year. While plans do change, you should ideally see most of them return. If not, consider what adjustments need to be made.
Question Type: NPS
Using an NPS to inquire about referrals is another great way to measure event success. While some people may have enjoyed the event, the true test of their experience is to see whether or not they’d subject a friend to it. Follow up on positive responses to this question with referral links and special offers.
Question Type: Open-ended
Open-ended questions allow participants to give you feedback on anything your event survey may not have covered. You won’t be able to cover every aspect of the event in the survey. This question serves as a catchall for any additional feedback.
Question Type: Open-ended
Use this question before the event to make schedule adjustments or other tweaks that magnify the most coveted aspects of the experience. Give the people what they want and show them that your focus is truly on their experience
Question Type: Open-ended
This is a great question for multi-day events. Remember to address any concerns or negative feedback personally and do your best to apply the feedback for the following days. Multi-day events present a unique opportunity to improve your event before it’s even over.
Question Type: NPS
All of these big-picture event characteristics shape the experience for attendees. You may find some surprising insights for the next time you plan an event. And because all of these factors are within your control, the changes will be easy to make and measure in the future.
Note: In the era of hybrid events, the hybrid event platform you use to power your experience is the venue. As a result, you should evaluate attendees’ experience in navigating it, similar to how you would ask an attendee to rate a traditional venue.
Question Type: NPS
Networking is a key element of events, but with the rise of virtual and hybrid events, networking has become more complicated. In fact, according to Bizzabo data, 46% of event organizers believe it is more difficult to provide networking opportunities when hosting a hybrid event. Ask this event survey question to make sure you have found the right solution for your attendees. Be sure to have a text box along with the NPS rating so participants can elaborate on their experiences.
Question Type: Yes-no
This event survey question can illuminate areas where your event platform or registration software may not be a user-friendly experience and cause frustration with attendees. If you realize there is a pattern in the responses, talk to your event platform provider or user-experience team to improve on the experience. The last thing you want is for attendees to have trouble even accessing the event because it sets the tone for the rest of the event.
Question Type: NPS
Attendee satisfaction is a key indicator that people will return to your events. Making sure your speakers and sessions are interesting and valuable is a top priority to ensure attendees are satisfied with the experience. Questions like this one help you get an idea of what is worth repeating for future events.
Question Type: Open-ended
Your post-event survey can be a launching point for ideas for your next event. Attendees may have suggestions and interesting perspectives you otherwise wouldn’t have known. Ask attendees what they want to see and design your next event with their feedback in mind.
Question Type: NPS
We’ve all been to an event where the session ran out of time, leaving nothing for discussion, and quite frankly, it’s a letdown. If attendees felt like there was not enough time, consider carving out more time for attendees to participate in the discussion.
Question Type: NPS
Content length is especially important for virtual events. Attention spans are getting shorter, and tuning in from home provides a plethora of distractions. In our Virtual Benchmarks Report, we found that the average virtual attendee only watches 68% of a virtual session that is 20 minutes or longer. That comes out to just over 13 minutes. By asking this event survey question, you can gauge if your sessions were the appropriate length for your audience or use the insights to take action to improve durations for the next event.
Question Type: Open-ended
The main objective of this question is to find out where attendees first heard about your event. Use the information you gather from this event survey question to see what marketing channels work best for your event and where you need to improve.
Question Type: Yes-no
Similar to attendees, your volunteers often represent the backbone of your event. Knowing they enjoyed the experience enough to recommend future volunteers should be gratifying. Plus, there usually aren’t enough volunteers to go around, so having some people to follow up with could help build out your team.
Question Type: Yes-no
If volunteers are willing to come back again then you know you’ve thrown a great event. Keep a list of these names and calculate how many volunteers you’ll need for next year.
Question Type: Open-ended
This open-ended question shows sponsors and partners that you value their opinions as collaborators. You’ll also want to start with a broad question like this one because it will help them think critically about the details in the following points.
Question Type: Yes-no, Open-ended
While you may already know their goals, you might not know what they were expecting from this event. Generally speaking, it’s often hard for anyone to gauge their assumptions about an experience until it is over, which is why including this question along with a prompt to further explain their answer is often more insightful than simply checking yes or no.
Question: NPS
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To create a great sponsor partnership, you need to ensure the event audience is relevant to sponsors. Often, brands sign up to sponsor events to achieve sales and marketing goals or brand visibility. If the audience is irrelevant, sponsors will have less success engaging with attendees and fall flat on their goals.
Question Type: Open-ended
This question will give you a good idea of if your sponsorship packages were valuable or not. Keeping the question open-ended will help educate you on exactly what the sponsors found valuable. If the responses are good and the event ROI was high, you could also use these answers as proof demonstrating to future sponsors your sponsorship opportunities are a great investment.
Bonus Tip: According to our Event Marketing Report, 54% of event marketers have trouble showing event ROI to key decision-makers. Make sure to give your sponsors plenty of data to help them track ROI and make sure their event sponsorship made an impact. The easiest way to do that is by using sponsorship management software and an event analytics platform that captures all the data sponsors could be interested in.
Question Type: Yes-no
Ideally, all of your sponsors and partners would love to do the event every year. Be sure to do a pulse check and determine if their experience of the event was all they’d hoped it would be. Follow up with no responses for more information on why they won’t be returning.
Question Type: Yes-no
Preparation is a key element to any presentation’s success. By asking your speakers if they felt they had the information needed to successfully present you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your speaker preparation. If a speaker answers no, be sure to personally follow up with them to get more information, not only will they feel heard but you will gain invaluable insight into how to create a better experience next time.
Question Type: NPS
For in-person events, speakers are the most concerned with the elements of the venue that either enhance or detract from their presentation. No one else can give you a better idea of venue effectiveness than a speaker can. You can modify this question for virtual and hybrid events as well. For example, “How would you rate working with our production team and virtual platform?”
Question Type: Open-ended
This is especially important for the VIPs you hope to impress. Cater to their needs and ensure their continued involvement for years to come.
Question Type: Yes-no
Speakers are often very involved in their communities and networks and surround themselves with pros in their field. You can easily source new and fresh presenters for next year from this group. And with the recommendation of someone who has already done it, the decision will be a no-brainer for them.
Question Type: NPS
Your team will be intimately familiar with the cogs of your event. If they were confused or unclear about what was happening during the event, your entire system might need a total revamp. If they felt comfortable and empowered for the duration of the event, then you have a strong model to replicate in the future.
Question Type: Open-ended
To have a successful event team experience, you must have clear roles and responsibilities. If roles aren’t clear, it can lead to problems and miscommunications that impact the execution of your event. Asking your team for feedback will let you know if there are areas to improve in team communication at the next event.
Question Type: Yes-no
This question is a warm-up for the following. Reflecting as a team on event goals will give you a greater sense of whether you accomplished your event goals or not.
Question Type: Yes-no
Make sure to tie your event back into your main mission statement by asking employees to directly reflect on the impact it has had on what they’re trying to accomplish at this moment in time. If you don’t connect the event evaluation to the greater objective or plan, the event itself can feel isolated and unnecessary. Asking fellow employees to put the benefits into their own words reinforces their positive experience at the event and secures its slot in the marketing budget for next year.
Question Type: Yes-no
Zooming back out again, employees should consider how the actions of the marketing department directly affect their greater purpose in the company. Asking this question will even help you learn and make connections between how your event can (and should) support the company as a whole.
Question Type: NPS
Your virtual platform can make or break your event. Asking this question allows you to find out how attendees felt about the overall virtual experience. Make sure to include a prompt with room to add more in case participants wish to elaborate.
Question Type: Open-ended
Questions like this allow you to narrow in on those experiences while planning your next event. Knowing what worked and what is worth repeating saves you time when producing your next event. Keep a list of each point and find themes and popular responses to prioritize popular experiences next year.
Question Type: Yes-no
Success at a virtual event goes hand-in-hand with how easily attendees can navigate the experience. If attendees can’t find parts of the event due to a poor navigation design, they won’t be able to experience the event in full. This question will gauge if any improvements need to be made in the next iterations.
Question Type: NPS
When an attendee runs into an issue attending your virtual event, they contact your support team. Can’t log in? Contact event support. No audio? Contact event support. How the issue is resolved will leave a lasting impression. No matter if you have live chat, , or a knowledge base this question will help give you insight into if your current tech support system is working or not.
Question Type: NPS
There are many variables when it comes to audio and video at virtual events. Many speakers are presenting from their homes, leaving room for poor internet connections, bad audio quality, or less-than-optimal backgrounds. Ask attendees to rate the quality of audio and video. If attendees aren’t satisfied, do an AV audit and identify areas of improvement, then relay that information to speakers and presenters at the following event. Improvements might include minimum internet speeds, types of approved microphones, or sending presenter kits directly to speaker’s homes to ensure quality audio and visuals.
Although many of the questions above can be altered for a hybrid audience, we wanted to break out some questions specifically for hybrid events. Below, you’ll find questions followed by the type of question.
Note: This pre-event question allows you to provide different options in the future or to change plans before the event kicks off.
Event engagement is so much more than selling tickets. With the help of event survey tools, you can get to the core of the question, “How do I know if my event was successful?” and see if your event was a success. When crafting your surveys, keep these general ideas in mind:
A frequent question our users ask is ‘what questions do other users ask?’ We decided to dive into the Culture Counts database to look at what common custom questions our users put into their surveys. How are questions worded? How are they structured? What are the similarities? Let’s see!
Approximately 50% of the Culture Counts database is made up of custom survey questions. That means that unlike dimension or demographic questions, custom questions don’t have a set structure – they are almost entirely determined by users. There’s value in giving people free rein and seeing what questions they come up with, but this then leads us to ask if there are any patterns hidden in this wealth of data.
The answer is yes.
When we look at the 136,000+ survey questions that have been created in the Culture Counts database, we can start to see commonalities between them. In fact, 41% of all custom questions can be categorised into 31 distinct question types. For example, approximately 6.6% (9,058) of all database questions relate to a freetext box asking for additional comments, while 4.5% (6,218) ask about a respondent’s identity.
4.9% of all questions (6,723) are a pre-dimension message. Do you include these in your surveys? Here’s an example of what those look like from our friends at CircuitWest for one of their recent surveys.
Economic impact, marketing, and prior attendance questions are the next three most frequent custom questions before the numbers start to get smaller. What that means is that over 25% of custom questions in the Culture Counts database are one of the six types:
We’re eager to explore how we can make this information easier for all users to see! Read on below about how Culture Counts Data Scientists Tom McKenzie undertook the research to uncover these findings.
There is a wide range of phrasing for how similar questions have been asked in our database. As an example, a freetext type question along the lines of “Do you have any other thoughts or comments?” is often asked near the end of a survey to provide the respondents with the chance to give more detailed feedback (while providing the survey creator with a healthy dose of qualitative data to analyse).
Below is a selection of the variety of different phrasings this question has been asked as:
Any other thoughts or comments?
Please share additional thoughts and comments here?
Do you have any additional comments?
Do you have any other feedback?
Is there any further feedback you would like to share?
Do you have any other comments or feedback about the event?
Would you like to make any other comments?
And so on!
As you can see, there are some similarities in how each phrasing is asked, but there are also significant differences in the specific words used as well. The challenge, therefore, is how we can capture as many of these different phrasings as possible and count them all under one umbrella of “other thoughts or comments”, without allowing in too many other questions with a fundamentally different meaning.
The Fuzz (aka fuzzywuzzy) is a tool I find immeasurably useful when it comes to text analysis tasks. Open-sourced over 10 years ago, the tool provides a python library for partial string matching (“string” is just computer speak for text). This library was originally developed by Seat Geek to assist them with matching event titles from various sources on the internet, which might be a little messy; for example, “Cirque du Soleil Zarkana New York” and “Cirque du Soleil: Zarkana”. They found that while looking at a simple “edit distance” – i.e. how many changes you would need to make for the two strings to match – works well enough for very short or very long texts, it struggled with strings of 3-10 words, where it was “far too sensitive to minor differences in word order, missing or extra words, and other such issues”. To improve the performance in these cases they applied a number of tricks and techniques, such as looking only at the “best partial” match, looking at the words out of order, and looking at only the unique words in the string.
Given that our question texts often fall into this 3-10 word length region, the tools and algorithms developed in the library The Fuzz are well suited for us to use in this problem space!
However, matching one text to another is one thing, but what we really want is to group the questions into more generic question type categories. In other words, if we wanted to compare question ‘A’ in the database with some string ‘B’, what would that string ‘B’ be? We could compare every question to every other question in the database. But that would just show us which questions were most similar to one particular other question.
To work around this problem, a set of question “stems” was created for some predetermined generic question types. Each of these was matched to a generic question label. For example, a set of question stems for the “other comments” question type shown above might look like this:
Generic label:
“Other comments”
Question stems:
“Do you have any other”
“Do you have any additional”
“Is there any further”
“Any other comments”
This way each question in the database was tested for similarity against each of these question stems, and the closest match mean the question was assigned the generic label from the stem that it matched with (a threshold was also applied so that if no match was appropriate no label was assigned).
The analysis was repeated iteratively, where after a “run” the questions with match scores closest to (but below) the threshold were analysed and where possible new “stems” were created and associated with either existing generic labels or new labels created.
After a few iterations, we had successfully categorised over 40% of the questions in our database into 31 general question types! From these generic categories, we can visualise what some of the most commonly asked types of questions are. The figure shown here illustrates which are the most used question types for surveys created in .
We also can visualise the most commonly asked question types by year to get an idea of which questions may be becoming more or less relevant for our users.
Text analysis is inherently messy, but with the help of fuzzy string matching we are able to parse out some insights about how our users are using the Culture Counts Evaluation Platform. Next up we’re hoping to take on the challenge of analysing what some of the most common options/choices our users give to respondents for choice based questions. Language is important, and this work aligns with our ongoing research into inclusivity and representation, with the aim of passing on this knowledge and best practises on to our users. Stay tuned!
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About the author Tom McKenzie is a Data Scientist at Culture Counts.