Top questions to ask attendees and sponsors in your association’s post-event survey

Want to provide a great event experience?

Here’s what to include in your post-event surveys to get the feedback you need to improve the attendee and sponsor experience.

By Christine Bergeron, Marketing Coordinator, Community Brands

Gathering and analyzing input via post-event surveys is a powerful way to plan and improve your next event. Post-event surveys not only reinforce a positive experience once the event wraps up, but also helps you gain crucial insights to shape future events. And whether your events are in-person, virtual, or hybrid, online surveys help you gather input right away – while the experience is still fresh in everyone’s minds.

It’s common to ask some standard questions that allow attendees and sponsors to rate the overall experience and key aspects of the event. But in addition, including some more probing questions can give you even greater insight into attendee thoughts and preferences.

TIP: YourMembership association management software has online survey functionality built in, making it easy to create and send targeted surveys and get feedback.

Let’s take a look at some helpful questions to ask attendees and sponsors in your association’s post-event surveys. These can be asked as a mix of multiple choice and open-ended questions:

FOR ATTENDEES

1. Why did you choose to attend this event?
This question is a great way to gain insight into what’s driving attendees to your events. The answers to this question can help inform everything from marketing and content to speakers and venues for your next events.

2. [For virtual attendees]: How would you describe your experience on the virtual event platform?
A user-friendly online experience is a must for successful virtual and hybrid events. Asking this question can help you gauge what’s working and what’s not with the online aspects of your events.

3. What aspect(s) of the event did you find most valuable?
Asking this question can help you understand what’s meeting attendee needs at your events. It can also help inform your marketing efforts. For example, if you see that many attendees valued the networking opportunities, then you might want to add more networking events and/or emphasize networking in the marketing efforts for your next event.

4. What key idea(s) did you take away from the event?
Knowing what topics and ideas struck a chord with attendees can help in multiple ways. For example, use the feedback from this question to inform your decisions about sessions for future events. Also, consider setting up discussion groups in your online community so your members can continue conversations about these topics between events.

TIP: Online member community functionality is built in to YourMembership membership management software to help you increase social and community collaboration.

5. What would have made the event more valuable to you?
This question shows attendees that you really care about their input. It also demonstrates that you’re open to making changes that will make the event experience even better.

FOR SPONSORS

1. Why did you choose to sponsor this event?
As with attendees, this question is a great way to gain insight into what’s driving sponsors to your events. Sponsors’ answers can help inform sponsor packages and how you market them for your future events.

2. What benefit(s) did you find most important to your sponsorship?
You might be surprised at what benefits sponsors value most. Their answers to this question can help you emphasize more of what sponsors want in your sponsor packages and in sponsor solicitations.

3. What sponsor benefit(s) would you like to see in future events?
This is another way to find out how to enhance sponsor packages to make them more attractive to sponsors in the future.

4. What would have made the event more valuable to you?
Asking this question shows sponsors that you care about providing value. It also shows them that you’re open to their feedback and to making changes for future events.

Be sure to review feedback and incorporate your learnings into your next event plan. Here are a few ways to put the feedback into action:

• Schedule a meeting with your team to go over the data and make recommendations on how you can incorporate feedback into your event planning and marketing.
• If you need more details for some of the responses, follow up with attendees and sponsors. Just be mindful, based on their answers, as to whether you think they’ll be open to additional contact from your organization.
• For attendees or sponsors who indicate changes your organization could make to enhance the event experience, consider presenting them with your ideas for improvements and ask what they think.

Taking time to reach out to attendees and sponsors for post-event feedback (and putting the feedback to work) gives you another opportunity for engagement. It also gives you the insights you need to provide a better event experience and keep attendees and sponsors coming back event after event and year after year.

Learn more about how to make the most of your association’s events.
Watch the on-demand webinar, How to Optimize (and Maximize) Your Events with YourMembership association management software.