After an event, you will need to gather the necessary information to identify and address issues that went wrong and also understand what people liked about it. If you’re like most survey administrators, crafting your post-event present questions ahead of time is not always easy. While you shouldn’t discount the work that goes into this process, you also shouldn’t assume it must be complicated.
For instance, as long as you keep five simple concepts in mind when deciding what to ask after an event or conference, you should be able to present a variety of questions without much stress.
The Number of Questions to a Minimum – 10 Words
Asking too many questions can create unnecessary work for your users. It can also lead to lower response rates, so it’s generally best to balance quality with quantity by ensuring you have no more than six or seven questions in each survey.
You should also avoid asking follow-up or secondary questions because these can pose an undue burden on your respondent and yield unfocused information that isn’t useful.
Data like this may explain why many post-event surveys contain seven inquiries. These seven typically include three closed-ended (yes/no; multiple-choice; ranking) and four open-ended questions.
Short and Sweet Open-Ended Questions – 50 Words
If you choose to include a mix of open-ended and closed-ended inquiries, make sure you let your respondents know upfront what types of questions they can expect. In other words, don’t ask questions that take too long to answer unless you know that your audience can give detailed feedback.
If you want longer answers from users, only ask one or two additional questions by adding them as secondary inquiries afterward instead of holding them hostage in the middle of your survey. There are several ways to phrase a single inquiry, so why clutter things with too much text?
Ask For Feedback on Specific Aspects and Go from There
You could even put together a separate survey that only focuses on one or two specific areas to save time. This would allow you to address those post event survey questions in as much depth as necessary since you didn’t address other topics in your primary post-event survey.
For example, suppose you held a training seminar where you talked about multiple topics. Send out a follow-up questionnaire that only asks users to rate the presenters and their knowledge of these subjects rather than blurring the data by including all of it together.
Keep Questions Focused on the Event
Another common approach is asking respondents which sessions they attended and whether or not they would recommend the event to others. While this gives you insight into their overall opinion of the conference, it doesn’t provide much information that you wouldn’t already know just by looking at who attended and how many people signed up.
Be Specific About What You Want to Learn From Respondents
It may be best practice not to give away too much before asking for your users’ feedback, but again, why ask so many questions when you won’t get anything out of them?
Limit yourself to no more than four inquiries so that you can focus on getting valuable data instead of trying to find ways around giving your audience a voice. You also don’t want to make the process too exhausting or tedious for your audience, as they may quit the survey halfway through if it’s too long.