Virtual events are becoming more popular. Indeed, a LinkedIn survey of 200 B2B event organizers in the UK and Ireland found that 72% of businesses will maintain virtual events in the long run and 77% are willing to organize hybrid events. They provide companies with the opportunity to reach out to a wider audience without having to worry about traveling. But what’s the point of hosting a virtual event if you don’t get any feedback from your attendees?
Getting feedback from your attendees is important for two reasons:
- You can see how well your event was received by your attendees and improve it next time around.
- Feedback can help you understand what kind of events are needed in the future and which topics should be covered.
Collecting Feedback With A Follow-Up Survey
A follow-up survey is the best way to take the temperature after the event and to understand what worked and what didn’t. Since attendees used their computers or phones to attend the event, they are more likely to open an email with a survey if it’s sent shortly after the event.
Feedback can be quantitative or qualitative:
- Quantitative feedback is the data that is based on numbers. It can be in the form of ratings or scores for example.
- Qualitative feedback is the data that is not based on numbers. It can be in the form of comments, observations, or anecdotes.
In order to get a complete understanding of what your customers want and need from your virtual events, you should use both quantitative and qualitative feedback methods. They are great for different reasons: quantitative for understanding statistics and qualitative for understanding emotions.
If you’re looking for a tool to create great surveys, I recommend using Typeform.
Types Of Questions You Should Use
When preparing your survey, you can (and should!) use different types of questions depending on the kind of information you want to collect. The different types of questions you can use in a survey are:
- Multiple-choice: This type of question is the most common in a survey. It asks respondents to choose one answer from a list of possible answers. This type of question is designed to be quick and easy for respondents to answer.
- Yes/no: This closed question asks the respondent whether they agree or disagree with a given statement. The respondent selects yes or no and then moves on to the next question.
- Open-ended: Choose this type of question to ask the respondent for an answer without providing them with any hints, clues, or prompts. They are left to come up with their own response based on their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
- Rating scale: This format asks you to rate your agreement with a statement.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): It’s a score between 1 and 10 often used to measure customer satisfaction. It helps you compare your number of promoters vs your number of detractors. Promoters are the people who rated your event between 9 and 10 and detractors rate it between 1 and 6.
Examples Of Good Follow-Up Questions After A Virtual Event
The first question you should ask should be something like “Did you attend the event?”. It will help you sort answers between people who registered but did not attend and “authentic” attendees.
It’s important to make sure that the following questions of your survey are relevant, and result from what people answered previously.
Follow-Up Questions For People Who Did Not Attend (But Registered)
To people who registered but didn’t attend, you can then ask them why they didn’t attend. This can be a multiple-choice question: perhaps the event couldn’t fit in their agenda or they forgot about it. Answers to that question will help you optimize future events with better reminders and/or shorter sessions for example.
Follow-Up Questions For People Who Attended The Virtual Event
You should then focus on people who attended the virtual event to get genuine feedback from them. Ask them about the reason why they decided to attend, what was their goal of attending the event? If you want to easily analyze the data collected for this question, you can use a multiple-choice question with the most popular answers listed and an “other” option to allow respondents to describe their specific goals if needed. If you want to collect qualitative data, I recommend using an open-ended question instead.
In any case, you should follow with a rating scale question to evaluate if they achieved their goals. If the main goal of attendees was to meet other professionals in their industry and most of them didn’t reach it, it means that you need to improve your networking process.
The possible follow-up questions for attendees are endless and they depend on the type of virtual event you’re hosting. Here is a list of the most popular ones that can suit any event:
- What did you like the most about the event?
- Is there anything we should improve for the next event?
- Which speaking session did you enjoy the most? Why?
- How would you rate your experience navigating the virtual event?
- How easy was it to connect and interact with new people at the event?
- How was your experience with the Q&A section: did you ask questions and was it easy to get answers?
- How would you describe the quality of the audio and video during the event?
- Did you face any technical issues during the event? If yes, did you solve them, and how?
You can end the survey by leaving an empty field for respondents to add any additional comments or thoughts. You can also ask them if they would recommend this event to a friend? (NPS question).
Conclusion
Conducting a follow-up survey is the best way to get genuine feedback from your attendees after a virtual event. Send it quickly after the end of the event to increase the response rate. And don’t forget to use different types of questions to get both qualitative and quantitative data.
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