20+ post-event survey questions to ask after an online event

Your online event was a success, and now you’re ready to relax—almost! Before you fully unwind, make sure to send out post-event surveys to your attendees.

These types of surveys help you collect deep insight directly from your event attendees in their own words so you can plan and improve future events that are guaranteed to be worthwhile to your audience.

Not sure where to start with survey questions or how to analyze the feedback? In this article, we’ll show you exactly what to ask and how to use those insights to create even better events down the road.

Why you need to ask post-event survey questions

Whether you’re hosting a webinar, virtual event, or conference, collecting and analyzing feedback from attendees and event stakeholders helps you plan and improve next year’s event and reveals key insights you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Sure, you could gather data without surveying attendees—like the event’s ROI or sign-up rate—but quantitative data alone won’t help you understand how to improve future online events or why your event performed the way it did.

Giving a voice to your attendees through post-event surveys will help you understand who attended your event and pinpoint areas for improvement. You can even poll event organizers and presenters to see how they thought the event went and gather suggestions for improving the event planning in the future.

Post-event surveys help you

• Build trust: when you ask your audience for their opinion, you're telling them you care about their experience and that they can trust you to host more worthwhile events in the future

• Eliminate guesswork: get valuable feedback directly from event attendees and planners so you don't have to make guesses about why your online event was or wasn’t a success

• Estimate event growth: running a Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) survey helps you estimate how much your event will grow in the following years by finding out whether attendees would recommend your event to others

• Improve future events: you can use the insight and constructive feedback you get from attendees to improve future events

💡 Pro tip: to run a post-event survey that leads to actionable results, choose a platform that makes collecting feedback simple and effective.

Contentsquare Surveys offers an easy-to-use builder to create your surveys, curated survey templates, and powerful features like AI-driven insights, direct response analysis, and automated summaries to help you make sense of the feedback. 

Sit back and relax as AI generates a post-event survey based on your goal in seconds, then find out which factors lead to a successful event with an automated report that provides a brief overview of what attendees had to say, taking the stress out of manually analyzing loads of responses.

Analyze responses with AI insights, explore the data directly, and generate automated summaries to quickly identify key takeaways for your next event

2 types of post-event survey questions (with 20+ examples)

There are 2 main types of survey questions you can ask after your event: 

• Open-ended questions help you uncover valuable insights but can be more challenging to analyze

• Closed-ended questions are quicker to analyze but don't provide the same level of depth

Useful post-event surveys—that is, surveys that give you actionable feedback—include a mix of open- and closed-ended questions, but what questions you ask ultimately depend on the feedback you want. For example

• If you want thoughtful answers, ask an open-ended question like “What would you like to see improved for the next event?”

• If you want to know whether your event met attendees’ expectations, ask a yes or no question like “Did our event meet your expectations?”

• If you want to know the level of satisfaction with your event, use a Likert scale so attendees can rate your event

• To track potential event growth, use rating scale questions like “How likely are you to recommend this event?”

• To segment your audience, ask nominal questions like “What is your job title?”

Here are some examples of event questions to ask depending on your goals and the type of feedback you need.

1. Open-ended post-event survey questions

Open-ended questions are broad questions that can’t be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. They require thoughtful answers from your event attendees, making them helpful in collecting rich, qualitative data.

Open-ended questions are great for getting detailed answers about your attendees’ event experience, but they can be difficult to analyze and require more time (and thought) from participants than closed-ended questions.

Examples of open-ended post-event survey questions

Limit open-ended questions and clarify the wording so participants know exactly what you’re asking. Use an open-ended question to supplement or complement closed-ended questions and gather more information about attendees' thoughts on specific parts of the event.

2. Closed-ended post-event survey questions

Closed-ended questions are narrow questions that don’t require detailed answers. As a result, this type of questions is easier to quantify and analyze because they have specific answers your recipient must choose from. If you want more detail, allow respondents to elaborate on their answers with a follow-up open-ended question.

💡 Pro tip: use follow-ups to add context to your closed-ended questions.

With Contentsquare’s Survey Logic feature, you can set up custom logic to ask follow-up questions by customizing your survey based on your respondents' answers.

For example, if you start with a closed-ended question like “Did our webinar meet your expectations?” you can send a follow-up question to those who answer 'no' to ask, “Why didn’t our event meet your expectations?"

Contentsquare Surveys gives you the option of taking the respondent to a specific question after they answer

Let’s take a closer look at the 4 types of closed-ended questions you can use to gather feedback after your event. 

1. Yes or no questions

These are the easiest questions to answer (there are only 2 options!) and can help you segment respondents for follow-up questions.

Examples of post-event yes or no questions

2. Likert scale questions

The Likert scale is a 5- or 7-point scale that measures a respondent’s level of agreement or the intensity of their feelings towards a particular statement. Likert scale questions are helpful when you want more in-depth insight into how attendees feel after your event.

Using Likert scale questions to learn about ease-of-use (e.g. how accessible the event was or how easy it was to sign up), as well as people’s overall satisfaction with the event, will help you measure your Customer Effort Score (CES) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). 

Likert scales can help you understand attendee satisfaction at a glance, giving insight into whether they’ll attend future events or refer them to someone else.

Examples of post-event Likert scale questions

💡 Pro tip: want to boost satisfaction? Consider adding a pre-event survey to your event marketing strategy. It’s a great way to get your audience involved early and make sure you’re on track to meet their expectations for the event experience.

3. Rating scale questions

Rating scale questions display answers on a scale, usually from 1 to 10, but you can customize the scale range or even use different qualifiers like emojis (just make sure it’s clear what each end of the scale represents). You can then plot responses on graphs and charts to find trends in your data.

Rating scale questions are useful for evaluating multiple online events to learn whether they improve over time. Running and analyzing an NPS® survey using a rating scale to ask people if they would recommend your event is great for knowing whether you’ll get a good turnout for future events.

Examples of post-event rating scale questions

4. Nominal questions

Nominal or multiple-choice questions help segment your audience into categories for further analysis.

For example, you might notice those who watched the event replay had lower levels of satisfaction with your event than those who attended live. This information helps you pinpoint specific areas you need to address.

Examples of post-event nominal questions

💡 Pro tip: while the goal of a post-event survey is to collect feedback after an event, it’s worth displaying the survey on your attendees’ screens before the event wraps up. 

With Contentsquare’s Surveys capability, you can easily embed a pop-up survey on any webpage, ensuring responses are fresh while the event is still top of mind. If you prefer a more detailed questionnaire, you can always send it later via email or social media—just remember, response rates tend to drop over time.

Customize your post-event survey using Contentsquare to match your event branding

What to do with post-event survey data

Once you collect your answers, it’s time to analyze your survey data and use it to plan your next event.

Closed-ended questions are easy to analyze and organize since you can arrange the responses into charts and graphs. For open-ended questions, you can use Contentsquare’s open-ended questions analysis template.

After organizing and analyzing your survey data, use it to

• Schedule follow-up interviews to dig deeper within a specific area

• Reach out to dissatisfied event attendees to gain back their trust and learn more about what caused their dissatisfaction

• Get permission from event attendees to create testimonials or personas from their survey responses

• Plan necessary changes for your next event

💡 Pro tip: need more help creating surveys and finding the right participants? Check out our guide on running a successful online survey to gather actionable insights and host an event your audience won’t want to miss. 

Post-event survey FAQs