BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS) of Tennessee even likes to use surveys after receptions to gauge attendees’ experience. Pictured: BlueSky Tennessee Institute celebration at the BCBS headquarters in Chattanooga. Photo by Sergio Plecas / BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

What’s the best way to know if your event was successful? While the number of attendees is important, the key factor is its ability to hold your audience’s attention and encourage participation. This is called engagement, and the best way planners measure it during an event is a method that’s been around for almost 200 years: the survey.

Surveys are a tried-and-true way professional event planners use to gather relevant data. By asking targeted questions to attendees, event planners better understand what event aspects were successful and which could use improvements, such as food, timing and accommodations.

However, when it comes to how engaging an event or meeting was for attendees, that’s where the most powerful data will come from. How attentive were your attendees? How many actively participated? What was your retention rate? Tracking engagement metrics like these will help planners analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of their events so they can plan accordingly for the future.

“I use them with almost every event,” says Laurel Eldridge, manager of corporate events and sponsorships at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. “We’ve gotten to the point where even if it’s just like a reception where there’s not a lot of content that was presented, we still want to know how their experience was. And so, we’re definitely using them a lot.”

Asking the Right Questions

Audience engagement can be tricky to define if planners don’t ask the right questions or fail to track clear engagement goals. Audience engagement is only meaningful if you have the right tools to record accurate data to help turn attendees into active participants. That’s why it’s integral for event planners to work with company leadership to help plan the right content and flow.

David Longobardo is a senior producer with L!VE, a technology and event company based in Columbus, Ohio. Most of his company’s clients create their own meeting and event agendas, and it’s up to L!VE to advise on structure and flow so that attendees are actively engaged. Some of his survey questions revolve around event length, number of breaks provided and the relevance of the keynote speaker.

“Some of those survey questions will be ‘Was two hours in a session too long?’ ‘Would you have preferred additional breaks?’ ‘Was the addition of a keynote speaker outside of your industry beneficial?’… those sorts of things to provide information for our own notification as well as advising the existing client and future clients,” says Longobardo.

Knowing exactly what the meeting or event entails and the key points attendees should walk away will help planners set clear KPIs that align with their desired outcomes. With that in mind, planners should make sure their questions are specific, realistic and measurable.

Eldridge says it’s vital for planners to be intentional when thinking about their goals and how they will measure them because that feeds directly into what kind of information they should be asking from attendees and what they’ll do with that collected data to get the best insights.

“That’s something that we’ve really started to do a lot more with that data,” she says. “One thing that I do, if I have repeat events, I like to try to use one or two questions that are kind of standard. One that I like is ‘Was your overall experience positive?’ I have one question that is the same across all my surveys. And so, if I just need one quick metric to share with stakeholders, I can pull that. I like having something that’s consistent.”

It’s also important to know how planners want their attendees to engage so their questions can align with their expectations. Will there be group activities or workshops? A Q&A session? A cocktail hour? Activities like these are great ways to encourage participation.

Some of the engagement aspects planners can use in their survey include:

• Number of attendees before and after the event
• Satisfaction with session length
• Quality of presenters, presentations, breakout sessions, etc.
• Usefulness of supplemental materials, such as the agenda and downloadable resources

An important distinction to make when designing engagement surveys is the difference between quantitative and qualitative feedback. Quantitative feedback involves simple yes/no questions or a rating scale and is generally easier to measure. Some examples of quantitative feedback questions include:

• How satisfied were you with the sessions and speakers?
• How likely are you to participate in future meetings?
• Were the topics relevant to your work?

Qualitative feedback questions are typically open-ended and require short-form answers from attendees that offer more detailed information about the success of an event, like these:

• What did you enjoy most about this meeting?
• What topics would you like to see more of at our next event?
• How did you feel about the duration of the content?

Surveys, of course, don’t have to include all questions. Polls and quizzes can be just as effective and provide a fun way for attendees to test their understanding of the presentations they heard and offer feedback. Slido, Kahoot! and Poll Everywhere are great tools to spice up the survey process, whether it’s before, during or after the event.

“We use a couple of varieties of surveys,” says Deanne Figueras, CMM, CMP, senior manager of meetings and conventions at California and Nevada Credit Union Leagues. “We do an overall event survey where we’re asking people lots of different questions, everything from where you would like to meet to what dates and locations work for you, in order to help us have a better sense of who our audience is and where they would actually like to meet. We may think that people want to meet in Las Vegas but then we find out from our surveys that it is too costly. We would not have known that if we did not survey them.”

Best Survey Tools

When it comes to the best tools to use when planning surveys, SurveyMonkey is a clear standout, mainly for its intuitive design for planning and ease-of-use for attendees. Other popular survey tools are Qualtrics and Jotform. While these tools require users to manually input their questions, online software like Pollfish and SurveyMonkey’s newest offering, SurveyMonkey Genius — which Longobardo uses — are utilizing artificial inteligence (AI) to make the survey building process faster.

It’s as easy as writing out a prompt which AI will then use to create a series of questions. AI is still a new technology in event planning and its use is limited currently, but Longobardo has found another benefit to it. “I think it’s hugely beneficial when it comes to parsing data. So if you’ve got 2,000 people who filled out a survey, using AI to kind of go through that data, create buckets of information that are more beneficial to you, I think is super, super helpful, instead of having a team of interns pouring through those survey results.”

Of course, there’s always the good old-fashioned pen and paper method, too.

Timing is Everything

Part of planning an engagement survey must include timing. While distributing a survey is obviously best done after the event, it’s how soon after that really matters. Planners can choose to deploy their survey at the end of their event while everyone is still there, or they can send it out via email later that day, or even the next day.

The key is not to wait too long or planners will risk getting fewer responses. The goal is to make this process as easy as possible for attendees, and that means while the event is still fresh on their minds.

If planners choose to send out a survey after the event is over, they will need to make sure they have an attendance record with attendees’ emails so they can send them a link.

“We typically send out a message like a thanks-for-attending email, and any follow up links or information packets that we said we’d share after the meeting, and then a link to a survey,” says Eldridge. “But one thing we have definitely noticed is that the sooner we can get something out, the more responses we typically get. And sometimes getting that email out takes a little time.”

Eldridge has been using a QR code at the end of the last presentation, which makes it easy for attendees to access the survey. She notes that there is a difference in the quality of the feedback she gets when using a QR code for immediate responses versus a follow-up email after the event.

“They click on the QR code and go straight to the survey and just give some immediate feedback. But then it might not be the same quality feedback … people just want to answer really fast on their phones and move on. And then if they get the email, they might sit down with it and spend a little more time giving you some comments.”

She believes both, however, are valuable, especially if you can get more attendees to respond by having that additional immediate channel opportunity. “Usually we get about — I would say it’s a little bit low — 15% will use that QR code unless we’re really up there in the front of the room going, ‘Hey, get out your phone, take a picture of this.’”

Figueras finds that asking just two or three questions during the event via a social media app such as X tends to get the most responses. Those questions can be answered with a simple star denoting one-word answers like yes or no. After the event, she sends out an overall feedback survey with no more than 10 questions to avoid survey fatigue.

“We try to be consistent year over year in what we ask so that we can look at the benchmarks and the trends rather than changing the questions up,” she says.

Making it Personal

While using digital surveys is convenient and can be quick, Longobardo prefers a more personal approach. “The best sort of feedback that we have found, from our perspective, has just been one-on-one. Let’s sit down and have a post-communication meeting and get that feedback directly.”

Regardless of how planners implement an engagement survey, it’s crucial to plan with the end in mind, starting with the goals and objectives they want to measure. Then, they can pick the tools that are right for them, and execute a plan of action, communicating the importance of the survey to their attendees during and after the event.

Strategy with clear, concise goals is key. “It’s all about information, so whatever information you want to get, you add it into the survey,” says Longobardo. “If you could sit down with every single one of your people that you’re sending the survey to and have a candid conversation with them . . . what exactly is it that you’re looking for?” I&FMM