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20+ post-event survey questions to ask after an online event
You spent months planning your online event, and now that it’s over, it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Not so fast! After hosting an event, there’s one more thing you absolutely must do: send post-event surveys to your attendees.
Post-event surveys help you collect deep insight directly from your event attendees—in their own words—so you can plan and improve future events that are guaranteed to be worthwhile to your audience.
But what questions should you ask, and what should you do with the feedback you collect? In this article, you’ll learn which post-event survey questions to ask and how to analyze your responses. We cover:
Host an online event your audience will love
Use Hotjar Surveys to collect attendee feedback and learn how you can host the most worthwhile online event for your audience.
2 types of post-event survey questions (with 20+ examples)
You can ask two main types of questions after your event: open- and closed-ended questions.
Open-ended questions allow for deep insight but are harder to quantify and analyze, while closed-ended questions are easier to analyze but don’t offer deep insight.
Useful post-event surveys—that is, surveys that give you actionable feedback—include a mix of open- and closed-ended questions, but the types of survey questions you ask ultimately depend on the post-event feedback you want. For example:
If you want thoughtful answers, ask an open-ended question like “What would you like to see improved for the next event?”
If you want to know whether your event met attendees’ expectations, ask a yes or no question like “Did our event meet your expectations?”
If you want to know the level of satisfaction with your event, use a Likert scale so attendees can rate your event.
To track potential event growth, use rating scale questions like “How likely are you to recommend this event?”
To segment your audience, ask nominal questions like “What is your job title?”
Here are some examples of event questions to ask depending on your goals and the type of feedback you need:
1. Open-ended post-event survey questions
Open-ended questions are broad questions that can’t be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. They require thoughtful answers from your event attendees, making them helpful in collecting rich, qualitative data.
Open-ended questions are beneficial for gathering detailed answers about your attendees’ event experience, but they can be difficult to analyze and require more time (and thought) from participants than closed-ended questions.
Limit open-ended questions and clarify the wording so participants know exactly what you’re asking. Use an open-ended question to supplement or complement closed-ended questions and gather more information about attendees' thoughts on specific parts of the event.
2. Closed-ended post-event survey questions
Closed-ended questions are narrow questions that don’t require detailed answers. They usually come in one of the following forms, and we’ll cover examples of each one below:
Yes or no questions: "Did you like today’s event?"
Likert scale questions: "On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied were you after attending the event?"
Rating scale questions: "Rate our event on a scale from 1 to 10."
Nominal questions: "Did you attend the event live or watch the replay?"
Closed-ended questions are easy to quantify and analyze because they have specific answers your recipient must choose from. If you want more detail, allow respondents to elaborate on their answers with a follow-up open-ended question.
💡 Pro tip: use Survey Logic to add context to your closed-ended questions.
With Hotjar Surveys, you can use Survey Logic to ask follow-up questions by customizing your survey based on your respondents' answers.
For example, if you start with a closed-ended question like “Did our webinar meet your expectations?” you can send a follow-up question to those who answer 'no' to ask, “Why didn’t our event meet your expectations?"
Examples of post-event yes or no questions
Yes or no questions are easy to answer (there are only two options!) and can help you segment respondents for follow-up questions.
Examples of post-event Likert scale questions
The Likert scale is a 5- or 7-point scale that measures a respondent’s level of agreement or the intensity of their feelings towards a particular statement. Likert scale questions are helpful when you want more in-depth insight into how attendees feel after your event.
Using Likert scale questions to learn about ease-of-use (e.g. how accessible the event was or how easy it was to sign up), as well as people’s overall satisfaction with the event, will help you measure your Customer Effort Score (CES) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Likert scales can help you understand attendee satisfaction at a glance, giving insight into whether they’ll attend future events or refer them to someone else.
💡 Pro tip: to guarantee high satisfaction levels, it’s worth considering including a pre-event survey in your event marketing strategy to involve your audience from the beginning, and ensure you’re meeting their expectations about the attendee experience ahead of time.
Examples of post-event rating scale questions
Rating scale questions display answers on a scale, usually from 1 to 10, but you can customize the scale range or even use different qualifiers like emojis (just make sure it’s clear what each end of the scale represents). You can then plot responses on graphs and charts to find trends in your data.
Rating scale questions are beneficial for evaluating multiple online events to learn whether they improve over time. Running and analyzing an NPS® survey using a rating scale to ask people if they would recommend your event is great for knowing whether you’ll get a good turnout for future events.
Examples of post-event nominal questions
Nominal or multiple-choice questions help segment your audience into categories for further analysis.
For example, you might notice those who watched the event replay had lower levels of satisfaction with your event than those who attended live. This information helps you pinpoint specific areas you need to address.
💡 Pro tip: while the goal of a post-event survey is to collect feedback after an event, it can be helpful to have the survey displayed somewhere on your attendees’ screen before the event is over.
Hotjar Surveys lets you embed a simple pop-up survey anywhere on a webpage so you can direct your attendees’ attention to it during the event and make sure their responses are fresh in their minds. Alternatively, you can share a more thorough questionnaire with them later via email or social media (just keep in mind that response rates will decline the longer you wait).
The importance of post-event survey questions
Whether you’re hosting a webinar, virtual event, or conference, collecting and analyzing feedback from attendees and event stakeholders helps you plan and improve next year’s event and reveals key insights you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
Although you can gather data without surveying attendees—like the event’s ROI or sign-up rate—quantitative data is limited and won’t help you understand how to improve future online events or why your event performed the way it did.
Giving a voice to your attendees through post-event surveys will help you understand who attended your event and pinpoint areas for improvement. You can even poll event organizers and presenters to see how they thought the event went and gather suggestions for improving the event planning in the future.
Post-event surveys help you:
Build trust: when you ask your audience for their opinion, you're telling them you care about their experience and that they can trust you to host more worthwhile events in the future
Eliminate guesswork: get valuable feedback directly from event attendees and planners so you don't have to make guesses about why your online event was or wasn’t a success
Estimate event growth: running and analyzing a Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey helps you estimate how much your event will grow in the following years by finding out whether attendees would recommend your event to others
Improve future events: you can use the insight and constructive feedback you get from attendees to improve future events
💡 Pro tip: to run a post-event survey that leads to actionable results, choose an online survey tool that lets you collect feedback effectively, without hassle.
Hotjar Surveys has all the features you need to run a successful survey, from our user-friendly survey builder to our AI-powered survey generator and curated survey templates. You can start building a survey today with our free forever plan, which lets you run three surveys at a time, each with unlimited questions.
What to do with post-event survey data
Once you collect your answers, it’s time to analyze your survey data and use it to plan your next event.
Closed-ended questions are easy to analyze and organize since you can arrange the responses into charts and graphs:
You can use Hotjar’s open-ended questions analysis template to analyze open-ended questions.
After organizing and analyzing your survey data, use it to:
Schedule follow-up calls to dig deeper within a specific area
Reach out to dissatisfied event attendees to gain back their trust and learn more about what caused their dissatisfaction
Get permission from event attendees to create testimonials or personas from their survey responses
Plan necessary changes for your next event
💡 Pro tip: need more help creating surveys and finding the right participants? Learn how to conduct a successful online survey to get actionable insights that'll help you host an online event your audience is eager to attend.
Or, harness the power of Hotjar’s AI for Surveys: sit back and relax as our AI generates a post-event survey based on your goal in seconds, then find out which factors lead to a successful event with an automated summary report that provides a brief overview of what attendees had to say, taking the stress out of manually analyzing loads of responses.
Host an online event your audience will love
Use Hotjar Surveys to collect attendee feedback and learn how you can host the most worthwhile online event for your audience.
Post-event survey FAQs
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