Events
Event feedback survey
One overall rating you can compare year on year, a grid for the parts you control, and the question that decides your next event.
Why this survey gets sent
“The applause at the end tells me nothing. Everyone says it was lovely on the way out, and then half of them do not come to the next one.”
The politeness of a room is not data. A two-minute survey answered before people stand up turns the same goodwill into four numbers you can hold a budget meeting with — the programme, the speakers, the venue and the organisation, each rated on its own.
What is in it
- Which day did you attend? (date)
- Overall, how would you rate the event? (rating)
- Content, speakers, venue, organisation — one rating grid
- How did you hear about this event? (several answers allowed)
- Would you attend another event of ours? (yes / no)
- Anything else you would like to tell us? (long answer, optional)
About 3 min to answer
Event feedback survey
About 3 min
How to write this survey
Ask before they leave the room
The highest response rate you will ever get is the one you collect before the audience stands up. Put a QR code on the screen during the closing minutes, leave it there while the last session finishes, and ask for the two minutes out loud from the stage. What you gather in the hall is several times what the same survey gathers by email two days later.
If that is not possible, send the link the same evening rather than the following week. Memory of the venue and the timekeeping decays fast, and after a few days the answers stop describing what happened and start describing a general impression. Remind once after two days, then close the survey after a week and publish what you learned.
One overall rating, then the parts you control
Open with a single overall rating out of five, write its wording once, and then never change it. That number is the headline you compare this event with the last one — and changing a single word in the question quietly resets the comparison while the chart carries on as though nothing happened.
Then ask about the parts in one grid: content, speakers, venue, organisation. Four rows, because each row has a decision facing it — the programme, the invitation list, the contract with the hall, and how the team was deployed. A row you cannot change anything because of does not deserve the line it occupies.
The question that predicts your next event
The most useful question here is not about satisfaction but about intention: would you attend another event of ours, yes or no? A two-way choice is more honest than a scale, because an audience will pay you the compliment of four out of five and will not pay you the compliment of saying yes when they have no intention of coming back.
Read it crossed with the grid. The share of people who said no among those who rated the venue poorly is your entire argument in the next budget meeting; the share who said no among those who loved the content is a timekeeping problem, not a programming one. One figure of that kind changes a decision, where an average satisfaction score changes nothing.
One open box, asked precisely
Leave exactly one box to write in, and put a specific question above it: what is the one thing we should change next time? The phrase “any other comments?” is left empty in most responses, and what does arrive is usually a courtesy you cannot build a plan on.
Keep it optional, always. A required open question sends half the room to close the page, and you lose all of their ratings for the sake of a sentence they were never going to write. Ten people who each wrote one honest line is enough to tell you what happened in that hall.
Ask how they heard, and list your real channels
“How did you hear about this event?” looks like a marketing question inside a feedback survey, and it is the only question that tells you where to spend next time. Make the options the channels you actually used — not a generic list — and finish with one open option for the route you did not think of.
Allow more than one answer. Someone who saw the post and then heard it from a colleague cannot pick a single option honestly, and forcing one inflates whichever channel came last while hiding the one that started the interest. Read the results the same week, and send each speaker the rows that concern them before they hear it from somebody else.