How to create an event planning survey

How to create an event planning survey

Get your event preparation materials quickly and conveniently and reap the rewards of a successful event.

Who is this article useful for?

  • HR managers,
  • marketing or sales representatives,
  • festival promoters and organizers of leisure events.

Preview survey template

  • Discover the advantages of surveying before and after the event
  • Get inspired by concrete questions to ask in your survey
  • Find out ways to share your survey with the attendants
  • Learn how to use an online survey as a registration tool

Are you organizing a team building, lecture, conference or a social event for your colleagues? Use an event planning survey as a guide to find out in advance what your participants appreciate. Cover as many purposes the survey offers as you need - a registration form, a question sheet for the audience or a post-event evaluation. Collect feedback that helps achieve mutual satisfaction.

The responses in the event planning survey will deliver information on what the participants expect in relation to your event and what is needed on your part to ensure that these expectations are met.

Tip: Give the survey a form of a registration sheet where attendees provide necessary personal data and specify requirements (e.g. conference topic preferences, arrival time, parking space reservation, accommodation, vegetarian meals, etc.).

The added value you will get through the event planning survey

Tip: Create a survey that will gather anonymous questions from the audience during a presentation or a lecture. Share the survey link at the beginning. Display an overview of questions on a share page and pick the most interesting inquiries, the answers to which will help you illustrate the overall notion or particular details of the presented topic.

Why pay attention to the prep stage

The aim of each survey is to provide meaningful and useful data. Therefore, make your questions comprehensible and brief for the respondents. Outline a clear survey structure and always have the main purpose of your survey in mind.

The time spent on preparation will pay off dozen times later on various levels:

Getting accurate responses presupposes asking right questions

In Survio, you are offered a palette of 19 question types to choose from and use as you please. The point is always to make answering as effortless as possible for the respondents and get information that you will easily decode in their answers.

To create functional and engaging surveys in Survio, you don’t need to have any previous experience with research or its methodology. Let’s introduce the most used types of questions and their examples to give you a smooth start.

An example of a star rating question
An example of a single-choice question
An example of an open-ended text question
An example of a matrix question - single choices
An example of an NPS question

Tip: Don’t be afraid to combine closed-ended questions with the open-ended questions. Open-ended questions will bring you subjective opinions that will be a source of inspiration in terms of what improvements you can apply for the upcoming edition, how to make the program more enjoyable or which topics/guests will help you increase the attendance.

Get a more detailed insight into the variety of question types, which will ensure accurate and relevant answers from the respondents.

Choose from a variety of channels to target your audience

Survio works great on a desktop as well as on mobile devices. In addition, it allows response collection on many distribution channels. Feel free to use those that are convenient for you and your audience to get solid feedback and increase the response rate. Take a look at the following ways of sharing your surveys.

Survey e-mail invitations - use the invitation to fill in the questionnaire when planning and evaluating corporate / educational events. The form of an e-mail invitation is also suitable if you want to use the questionnaire as a registration form for guests.

URL or QR code with a link to the survey - distribute URL links and QR codes in the e-mails that you send to your audience. Whether digital or printed on a piece of paper and displayed in a meeting room, the QR code offers a comfortable opportunity to respondents to provide their answers and submit the questionnaire directly from their smartphones.

A questionnaire embedded in the website. There are three options you can select from as for displaying the survey to the respondents.

Examples of an embedded survey - iframe, pop-up window and a pop-over widget

Take a break and leave response analysis to Survio

All responses within a given questionnaire are processed automatically and in real time. The response analysis projects the data in summary results and individual answers, so that you don’t need any other software. You can choose a number of views, involving professional charts and comprehensible tables to make sure that the presented overview is fully comprehensible to the audience.

Depending on further use of the results, it is possible to apply filters and display the data exactly the way you need. The output can be exported in modern reports and dashboards by a couple clicks, which saves your time and makes you ready for a presentation in no time. Whether you wish to edit it or roll with what you get, you have a set of the most common formats - PDF, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .csv or Google Sheets.

An example of the result analysis page in Survio

It is not necessary to monitor answered questionnaires by constantly logging in to Survio. Just turn on automatic response notification by e-mail. A message will be sent to your e-mail every time a respondent submits a completed questionnaire. However, it is advisable to consider the size of the respondent group you are sending the survey to and the expected amount of notifications that might flood your inbox.

Conduct surveys to identify preferences and expectations

Once the responses have been collected and processed in results that you can compare and evaluate, it is important to conclude and plan the next steps.

1. Event planning / event evaluation survey

Event planning or event evaluation surveys primarily provide an overall picture of the preferences, requirements and expectations of the participants. Therefore, you will be more interested in the summary results.

Supplement the output of the event planning survey with a calculation of estimated costs and other topics that you will discuss within the organizational team. The result will be the approval of the event concept and its budget. Build evaluation of the event on a presentation of positive reactions and use them for preparations for the next year. Negative feedback represents a chance for a change or improvement. Make suggestions on how to get better at organizing events using the data from Survio, attach the overview of actual costs and close the event.

Tip: If you have important guests among the event participants whose responses you want to take into account above all, you will most likely be interested in individual responses. Generate a .xlsx or Google sheet report, filter out the respondents by their e-mail, look up for the output of the attendees whose responses you want to take into consideration and make comments on what needs to be arranged.

Tip: When sharing surveys via e-mail invitation, you will see replies linked to the respondent’s e-mail as they come back. Embedding surveys on the web, using a URL address or QR code or via social networks, you get anonymous data. If you wanted to sort or filter surveys from such sources by e-mail, you would need to ask for respondents’ e-mail within one of the questions in your survey.

2. Questionnaire as an event registration form / questions collection tool

Questionnaires, the purpose of which is the registration of participants, need to be considered separately. Therefore, you will be interested in the individual responses. In the table that Survio gets you, the rows represent completed questionnaires – registration forms and columns represent the relevant responses.

Surveys that you use “only” as a question collecting tool are not primarily about evaluating or analyzing results. The aim of such surveys is to encourage participants to submit questions. With the shared URL / QR code, you redirect them to the survey where you created a question with a text answer.

The texts entered by the participants in the response will be the questions for you. You can view their list on the share page and it is up to you whether you answer all questions or select only some. Draw inspiration from these questions for other topics to make your presentation more attractive and address new audiences.

Tip: If the questionnaire is to serve as an event registration form, it is not necessary to address each item in the form of a separate open-ended question. Simply use a single choice matrix and a text answer. This way you will have all the data from the participant in one question.

A reference from an event manager

Facilitate event planning activities with feedback from your audience

The event planning survey is extremely helpful for organizing any type of event. It is useful in several ways and each of them will bring you a number of benefits.

  1. Save your time guessing about what would make your events worth attending. Simply ask in the survey and prepare a tailor-made event for the participants without unnecessary stress and headache.
  2. Save your company budget. Don’t waste resources on activities that are irrelevant and mean nothing to the participants. On the contrary, invest resources where they will bring the desired effect, whether in the form of overall satisfaction of participants or increasing their loyalty to your company or brand.
  3. During the preparation of an event, you will be able to decide better on how it needs to be planned, having factual data from the questionnaires.
  4. You will learn the methodology of creating a survey, which you can use for your work.

In order to organize a workshop, professional lecture, conference or other educational event, get:

  1. information from and about participants in advance,
  2. ideas on current topics relevant to your field,
  3. an insight into approaching the overall concept of the event,
  4. an idea of a suitable venue with adequate facilities.

Following the event, we recommend asking participants for feedback. Use the post-event evaluation survey to find out what worked well in the previous year and what to work on for the future.

In addition to event planning and event evaluating surveys, Survio offers other ready-made and fully editable survey templates for a variety of domains.

We’ve also prepared a use case on how to create a survey, which will guide you through the creation of a survey, introduce you to the basic principles and show you an overview of essential features that Survio offers. Make surveys part of your workflow and start collecting feedback that will help you evolve.

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