Post-Event Survey Questions To Ask, Examples & Best Practices

After you host an event, you probably think you know how it went. Until that is, a colleague stops you in the hallway to tell you how much she enjoyed the karaoke mixer you thought hit a sour note with the office.

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Experiences vary, which is why it’s important to collect feedback from participants after any event. Event management is an enormous task, so the more data you collect, the more insights you have for planning future events. To make sure that you are getting the most valuable feedback, we've broken down the most common post-event survey types with five example questions for each.

Post-event surveys generally contain a mix of question types. Typically, these question types yield valuable feedback about the event’s presentations, location, and even the food. Sending surveys after events can help provide a list of action items for your next event to ensure it’s successful.

Rather than go with your assumption that a certain speaker didn’t hit the mark, you’ll have participant responses to gauge the success or failure of your sessions and overall event.

You can use a variety of different surveys after your events. One in particular, a Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey can help you gauge future growth of your events by asking attendees if they would recommend it to a friend. That will give you an indication of whether your next event could have a larger turnout from word-of-mouth marketing.

Constructive survey feedback will help you determine how to plan future events for the best attendee experience. It can also help you refine your marketing methods to improve attendance. Feedback will help you improve the ease of the registration process, the quality of the food, the friendliness of the event staff, and even the costs of production. This event planning survey template is great for looking ahead at future events.

You can customize your survey with the questions above or send it as-is in minutes. Learn more about our plans and pricing, or get started for free. 

Public events, like fundraisers, store openings, and tradeshows, help your organization reach people outside your immediate circle. Maximize public participation in future events by finding out what keeps people coming back for more.

It’s far easier to convince a former participant to attend another of your events than it is to convince someone completely new. Discover how many participants are ready to join your future events.

A conference without clear objectives can make attendees feel frustrated, like their time is being wasted. Ask participants to rate whether the conference met concrete objectives like, for example, setting specific professional standards.

Send surveys after events to gather information for your next event, in addition to evaluating the last event. Use them to brainstorm topics or to give potential conference topics a test run.

A great conference doesn’t end on the last day. It leaves participants with meaningful connections that they’ll follow up with later, and with speaker anecdotes that they’ll be repeating for years. Figure out if your conference is one of the great ones by reaching out to participants afterwards.

A successful professional training course expands its participants’ career opportunities by offering them new, useful skills. In a changing job market, ensure your courses measure up every time by routinely asking participants these five follow-up questions.

Ask participants to rate the date, location, sessions, and instructors. Be sure to include each instructor separately, since participants might be satisfied with one instructor, but not another.

Ideally, participants will be able to immediately apply the information they take away from training courses to their jobs. Evaluate the relevance of the course with this question.

While it’s a good idea to ask participants for feedback before, during, and after an event, sending surveys after events often provides the best insights. Use the questions above as a jumping-off point when writing your own post-event survey questions.

You may ask this as a closed-ended ranking question, so participants can easily let you know what made the biggest impression, or an open-ended question to allow elaboration.

While you may not want to ask for negative feedback, it’s important to know your shortcomings. Learn from them for your next event.

The “yes/no” answers will key you into the success of your event and the possible loyalties of attendees. This data is measurable and valuable.

Successful event planners use pre-event survey questions to get to know participants before events. Pre-event surveys yield beneficial information that will make your event more comfortable, accessible, and successful for you and your attendees. Pre-event survey questions also provide key information for use in planning future events.

Shortly before an event, use a pre-event survey to gather information about your marketing methods, preferred audience, and special needs of your participants. Send the survey in a confirmation or present it as a popup when registration is complete.

Find out what the excitement level is around certain speakers or agenda items. This will help later when you are looking for event sponsors and growing your audience.

There are several types of survey questions, and you’ll notice that some of them overlap, for example, a Likert scale question is a rating question and a closed-ended question.

The properties of each type of question are what determine its usefulness for your survey. Consider what type of feedback you’re looking for to help you choose the best questions for your specific needs.

A Likert scale question is a closed-ended question with a series of answers that rank satisfaction from one extreme attitude to another. It’s a specific type of rating scale that focuses on an odd-numbered range of equally distributed answers with a neutral choice at the center. While a Likert scale is a type of rating scale, the opposite is not necessarily true. Likert scale questions exclusively focus on answers on a defined spectrum.

A quick, painless way to gather information about your audience and can help inform your buyer persona. This will help you formulate your marketing strategy for future events. This demographic survey will show you the types of questions that yield demographic information from your survey takers.

If you’d like supporting documentation, photographs, or other information beyond a simple survey, a file upload question is the solution. A file upload option allows survey takers to easily upload whatever supporting documents or images you require. Check out our best practices for using file uploads in your surveys.

A slider question offers a sliding scale to indicate the answers to questions. These are useful when you want participants to answer specifically, but also want to easily gather the data. For example, if you want to find out how often someone engages in a behavior, rather than offer them closed-ended choices that may not be fully accurate or open-ended choices that make data more difficult to collect and quantify, a sliding scale may work perfectly.

Give context to your survey results with benchmark questions. The answers to these questions can be compared to others who used the same questions you did. Learn more about SurveyMonkey Benchmarks.

Not looking to start from scratch? Browse through our survey templates to find the best template for collecting event feedback.

So far, we’ve discussed the importance, advantages, and types of questions you can use for post-event surveys. Now let’s look at some important tips for actually conducting the surveys.

When you collect registration information, ensure that you’re asking each attendee for full contact information. This includes , number, and preferred method of contact. Ensuring that you have accurate contact information is crucial for follow-up—including your post-event surveys.

There are a lot of pre-event tasks related to event planning, so feel free to use our event planning checklist to stay on top of everything.

Prepare your post-event survey before the event. By having it ready to distribute to attendees, you can efficiently send it out within one business day of your event. It’s critical to send out a post-event survey while the event is still fresh in attendees’ minds. You can send your post-event survey over , load it on iPads at the venue, or share the survey link manually.

SurveyMonkey allows you to create your survey in advance and schedule distribution for the day and time of your choice. If you are short on time and cannot create the survey in advance, we have a post-event feedback survey template that you can quickly and easily customize to meet your needs. 

Remember to let your attendees know that you’ve used past feedback to make the current event better, so you can’t wait to hear what they have to say in their post-event feedback. By letting them know a survey is coming and that you use their responses, they will have an emotional incentive to complete your survey.

The surveys that yield the most useful information contain a mix of closed and open-ended questions. Closed-ended questions provide quantitative data, while open-ended questions supply you with opinions and comments in the attendees’ own words. 

Give attendees a few days to respond. Then send one or two reminders over the next two weeks. Don’t send more than three reminders, and refrain from sending them more than a month post-event. At that point, the data won’t be very helpful or useful.

To effectively engage attendees after your event, include a survey Thank You landing page featuring links to high-quality content such as keynote videos and slide decks. This approach expresses gratitude for their feedback and keeps the event fresh in their minds. 

Send your post-event survey questions to attendees while the event is fresh in their minds. Rather than collecting data on paper surveys, an online survey will increase your response rate. You can provide a link right at the end of your sessions or send the survey after the event when people have more time to devote to the survey. You can also put a survey QR code or link into the event presentations making it incredibly easy to provide feedback.

You’ll also receive more responses if you keep your survey short at 10 or less questions so people can provide meaningful answers.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Discussion System.

Now that you know the types of questions you can ask, how the data is useful to you, and have a bank of examples to refer to, what are you waiting for? SurveyMonkey has everything you need to write your pre and post-event surveys quickly and efficiently.

There’s enormous value in sending surveys to participants after an event. We’ve given you an idea of the types of questions you can ask, information on how to use the data, instructions for how to conduct a post-event survey, and a bank of sample questions. Don’t you think it’s time to get started?

SurveyMonkey has everything you need to create your event surveys. You can customize your survey with the questions above or use a template and send it as-is in minutes. Learn more about ourplans and pricing, or get started for free today. 

For employees, project reviews can feel a bit like giving a presentation in school. Just another awkward formality for them to get through. Yet asking the right questions in project review meetings sets the tone and makes all the difference to their effectiveness.

So, what are project reviews for? And how can you get the best from them?

Project reviews are check-ins over the course of a project to ensure everything’s going to plan. They focus on achieving key targets and resolving challenges.  And, ideally, you’ll combine them with a post-completion evaluation and capture learnings for future projects. But how do you get the best from them? You’ll need to look at:

• Why you need regular project update meetings
• 4 key questions to ask before you start
• 3 questions to review as the project progresses
• 3 questions to consider for the future

At the risk of stating the obvious, reviewing new or ongoing projects is a key business action. Otherwise, you run the risk of greenlighting unfeasible or irrelevant projects, or running hugely off track and off budget.

Project reviews are especially important where employees have high levels of autonomy. While that might sound contradictory, autonomy allows people to make their own decisions, but you need to ensure they’re heading in the right direction. Project updates help you set clear expectations and keep projects focused on their goals. So how do you make this happen?

10 key questions for project review meetings

Figuring out what to ask in these meetings can be a real headscratcher, especially if this is your first time conducting one. This isn’t a typical performance conversation, after all. Rather it’s an in-depth check-in which covers broader goals and deliverables.

So, we’ve provided ten essential questions for project review meetings below to make sure you hit the key points. You’ll find the questions split into three sections to emphasize the focus at each stage of the project. The questions for the first two phases, however, could (and probably should) be considered in all reviews.

• Before project kick-off:
  • Establishing the end goal
  • Defining project stages
  • Understanding the budget
  • Considering potential risks
• During the project:
  • Keeping the project team updated
  • Addressing stakeholder concerns
  • Identifying additional support needs
• After the project’s complete:
  • Rating the success of the project
  • Future project scope
  • Learnings to apply next time

Questions to ask before project kick-off

1. What’s the end-goal of this project?

The first thing you need to figure out is what you’re trying to achieve. Projects are often put together with general aims in mind, but now you need to get specific. What’s your metric for success? Is it a numerical figure? A specific outcome?

Asking questions about what your main goal is during your initial project review is especially important if you’re using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). That end goal is a great way to connect individual employee assignments to company objectives.

It also helps limit scope creep, an issue which over one-third of projects are subject to (Project Management Institute). As projects progress, their shape or requirements can shift. Being clear on your overall goal is essential for keeping everyone on track.

2. What will each stage of the project look like?

Clarifying each step in the process allows you to foresee potential roadblocks. And it limits the chances of you giving the go-ahead on half an idea. By creating a roadmap for the project, you’re using SMART planning in action, and breaking it down into smaller, simpler tasks.

These milestones identify what you should see at each stage. And they act as motivators. People see they’re making progress and know what to look for to be able to say something’s complete.

3. What’s the budget for this project?

You want to understand the aims and potential benefits of a project. But you also need to know the costs involved.

Different projects impose different financial demands. You might need new software, which can be pretty costly. With more than $100 billion (US) was spent on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software globally last year, it’s no wonder you need to plan ahead.

So, use your project review to ask about additional costs. Will you need overtime, more people, an advertising budget, or a social media campaign? This might not prevent unpleasant surprises later, but at least you’ll have a budget to work with. And that’s what informs your decisions about priorities.

4. Are there risks to the business or its employees?

Risks to the business could be systems impacts, downtime for rolling out new processes, products or training, and a whole host of other things. These are often considered, but the element which gets forgotten is your people.

Wellbeing is a key focus for many business, but lots of private sector organizations still have a way to go. They need better approaches to avoid employee risks, such as:

• Burnout
• Excessive workloads
• Job stress
• Work-related health problems (physical and mental)

When you assess these risks upfront, you spot areas for concern and can take action to mitigate them as you go. This not only protects the business and employees internally, but also plays an important role in diffusing potential PR nightmares before they happen.

Regular review questions to ask during the project

Once the project’s up and running, communication is key. Updating stakeholders, addressing concerns, reviewing resource needs – these all change. It’s also worth revisiting questions one to four to ensure your focus hasn’t wandered. So, consider asking:

• Are the original/current project goals still relevant?
• What does the next stage of the project look like?
• How is the project tracking against the budget?
• How well are any risks to employees/the business being managed?

In addition, you’ll want to consider:

• How well are you keeping team members updated?
• What are you doing to address the concerns of project teams and other stakeholders?
• What additional support do you need?

Good communication practices are the lifeblood of an effective workplace. Yet the leading cause of employee stress in UK small-medium sized businesses a few years ago was failure to communicate effectively.

Asking questions about how well you’re communicating in your project reviews encourages feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. Project leaders need to circulate information and maintain documentation. They also want to avoid spamming or micromanaging their teams, so help them get the balance right.

Side note: If you reviewed this question at project kick off, you may have agreed the channels of communication you’re using. Take the opportunity to check they’re working as intended. And, if not, make changes now to improve internal communication going forward. Its effectiveness is critical to project success.

6. Are you addressing the concerns of your stakeholders?

Good communication practice isn’t just about knowing what’s happening in the project. It’s also about addressing wider concerns. You might find projected timelines are unrealistic, or perhaps there’s a change in leadership. Whilst they still support the aims of the project, your new leader may have questions their predecessor did not.

That’s why project reviews must ask about the concerns of all your stakeholders. It links back to the risks you identified in question 4. And allows you to recognize and resolve issues for your leadership, team members and the business.

7. What additional support do you require?

Depending on how the project’s progressing, you may find the answer is “nothing”. Yet opening this discussion encourages people to think broadly. Perhaps there’s a process that’s slowing things down, or an approver who’s creating a block. Not everything is about extra resources or money you hadn’t planned to spend.

Ambitious project leaders may want to show you they can succeed with the bare minimum. Yet, that isn’t always the best way to get things done. So make sure your people are using all the resources at their disposal. And also explore job flexibility, or second internal knowledge specialists to tackle specific issues as they arise.

Project review questions once the project has finished

Retrospective reviews are a useful learning experience. They help you look at the successes and challenges of the project you’ve completed. And encourage learnings you can apply for future projects.

8. How would you rate the success of this project?

As with any performance-related review, the goal of this question is to share an understanding. Team members working on projects pick up details you’re too busy to notice. And, as the manager, you may have context which others can’t see.

It’s also a useful question to ask in your regular 1:1 meetings so you recognize individual contributions, or areas of concern. Of course, this should be done throughout the span of the project, but the final review offers a summary of how well (or not) you’ve performed on the whole as a team.

9. Will this project lead to future endeavors?

Was this project a one-hit wonder, or are there more albums waiting to be recorded? You don’t always know this immediately, as long-term outcomes can be hard to predict.

If you’re likely to do more of this project – an extension or repeat – you’ll spend more time thinking about the learnings. And considering how to make improvements at all stages.

Equally, if it’s a one-off, it’s still useful to reflect. Think about the people, for example. How well did they work together and who would be the dream team for a future project?  

10. What have you learned that will benefit future projects?

This is the part of the project review where you ask what happened and how things can be improved?  

Whether it’s a particular challenge that arose, an issue with internal processes or even inter-team relationship concerns, there’s always something to be gleaned from what you’ve just done.

Make sure, before you close the project completely, you identify any lessons you need to learn. And record them for the future so things run even smoother next time.

Make project reviews a habit

Like everything when you start it, project reviews might feel a bit of a pain. More time planning, less time doing. In some cases, leaders will see that as a waste of the resources you have. What’s important, however, is to get into that habit.

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