• Avoid yes or no questions, this can lead to taking the wrong conclusions from your evaluation results. After receiving your results, use the correct benchmarks to determine how to implement change e.g. If you notice 10% of your attendees said they did not eat the turkey dinner, maybe it was because of the fact that 10% was vegetarian and not 10% did not “like” the roast.
• Don’t wait around. Send out your event evaluation immediately after the event. This way the event will still be fresh in the attendees’ minds, enabling them to give an actionable, detailed report on their experience at your event.
• Keep it short and simple. Following the KISS principle will work miracles for your response rate. Survey response rate is directly correlated to survey length or duration, we’ve seen on average a 17% drop in response rate when a survey has more than 12 questions or takes longer than 5 minutes to complete.
• Respect your attendees’ privacy. You can ask demographic questions such as age, gender, nationality etc. This will help you market to the right target audience in the future. But don’t ask things you already know or don’t need to know. In light of recent events and the go-live of the GDPR rules, it’s important to create GDPR compliant surveys.

To use this Event Evaluation survey, sign up for Survey Anyplace , and choose ‘Event Evaluation’ as template when creating a new survey.

We’ve talked about how and what to ask in your event evaluation, the final part is who to ask it to.

Most events have three key groups: your guests, your VIPs, and your vendors/partners. It’s important to evaluate them before you let them evaluate you.

Be sure to ask yourself:

• How large is this group and can I properly manage that level of feedback? (Your VIPs and partners are often manageable but for large audiences, it can be hard to handle the volume of feedback without a powerful tool)
• How educated is this group about this type of event?
• How responsive is this group to feedback?

Typically, the most useful feedback comes from your VIPs and your vendors. These keys groups are small enough for you to manage the feedback, are educated in events well enough to recognize the good and “needs improvement” elements, and often respond to feedback requests.