Conference evaluations are an important step in the lifecycle of an event. They’re a way to record the opinions of all participants in an event, and one of the most critical tools for improving future events.
But where to start? First, a few guidelines:
1. Conference evaluations are only as good as what you do with them.
No matter what questions you ask or what information you gather, their true value comes from what you do with them. If you ask attendees what they think of the event’s schedule and then just have the same schedule the following year, you might as well have not asked what they thought to begin with.
2. Don’t ask questions that don’t matter.
For example, if you run an event that goes to a different hotel every year, asking questions about the waitstaff at the hotel restaurant probably doesn’t tell you how to make the event better next year.
3. The shorter, the better.
Conference evaluations, just like any other kind of survey or questionnaire, won’t get filled out if they’re too long. If you have an event with tens of breakout sessions and dozens of speakers, don’t ask for detailed feedback on every speaker at the conference.
But what kinds of questions should you be asking? It all depends on what’s important to you and the organization, but the easiest place to start is to ask yourself, “What do I want to know from attendees?” Are you thinking about making your event longer or shorter, but don’t know if that’s what attendees want? Put it in the conference evaluation. Ask all the questions about elements you’ve been toying with changing for future years of the event.
Building the Survey
1. Even if your survey is anonymous, you still have to know something about who’s answering.
No matter what, it’s important to know what type of participant someone was in the event. Attendees might tell you that there was too much time spent in the exhibit hall, but exhibitors might tell you that there wasn’t enough. Without knowing where the feedback is coming from, you can’t make the right call on whether to increase or decrease that time.
Likert scales are your friend.
You might not be familiar with the name, but you already know what a Likert scale is; Rank this session 1-5, 1-5 stars, or strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree. They’re an easy and fast way to get easily digestible data. If your respondents give a speaker an average score of 4.7 on a 1-5 scale, you know exactly what that means. Short answers where you get responses like “The speaker was amazing!” and “The microphones were too loud” are harder and take more time to summarize.
Look at your past surveys.
If you have them, take a look at your past surveys. One of the other reasons to take conference surveys aside from learning how to improve future events is to show how you’ve already improved year over year. To help with that, you can consider reusing questions from past surveys (even if they aren’t perfect) so you have a direct point of comparison.
If last year you asked, “Did you have fun at the opening reception, yes or no?” and this year you asked, “Rate the opening reception from 1-5,” you can get the rating for this year’s opening reception, but you can’t really compare it against last year’s results.
Once you’ve put together your survey, gotten feedback and tested it, there’s one thing left to do–send it out! The sooner you send your survey out following the event, the better. Better yet, send it out while your attendees are heading home and capture them when they’re sitting in Ubers or at the airport looking for something to do.
Be sure to send some reminders so you can collect the largest possible sample of your participants. Now all that’s left is to analyze the data and put it to work for a future conference, but that will have to wait for another blog post!
Paul Bierman
Paul Bierman joined the RGI team in 2023 as Director of Education and Events. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Sociology from Swarthmore College and is a Certified Meeting Professional (CMP). Paul considers registration management, working with boards of directors and creating budgets to be his areas of expertise.