The attendee survey is a fantastic tool for gaining an overall understanding of event performance. It helps answers the question “Was the event successful or not?” Attendee surveys help us to gauge audience perceptions and intent, but they typically do not provide the depth needed to answer the “why” behind your event’s success. For this, we need other diagnostic tools to go deeper into different elements of the experience. Enter keynote surveys and session surveys.
There are several questions you could ask on keynote and session surveys, including questions about format, length of time, etc., but often its best to keep them short and sweet, and focus on the core four.
1. Content Relevance
“Did you find the content of the session relevant?”
Answers: 5-point Likert Scale, “Not at all Relevant” to “Extremely Relevant”
Alternative Questions: “Was the content informative?”, “Was the content valuable?”
Follow-up questions: “Please rate the breadth of content.”, “Please rate the depth of content.”
Why it’s great: This question alone lets you know if the keynote or session content was on the mark. You can compare session scores against one another to rank the most to least relevant content to inform your content syndication efforts post event, or content planning for next time.
2. Speaker Quality
“Please rate the quality of the speaker as a session leader.”
Answers: 5-point Likert Scale, “Poor” to “Excellent”
Alternative Question: “Did the speakers effectively engage and captivate the audience?”
Why it’s great: This question helps gauge whether or not a speaker was a good presenter and engaged the audience in a meaningful way. It contributes to decisions on inviting speakers to participate in future events, or provides them valuable feedback to improve on for next time.
3. Speaker Knowledge
“How would you rate the speaker’s knowledge and expertise of the session topic and materials?”
Answers: 5-point Likert Scale, “Poor” to “Excellent”
Alternative Question: “Did the speaker(s) effectively communicate their ideas and insights?”
Why it’s great: This question helps gauge speaker expertise in the subject matter, and their perceived value to the audience.
4. Engagement / Interactivity
“Were there opportunities for audience participation or Q&A?
Answers: 5-point Likert Scale, “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”
Alternative Question: “Were you able to engage with the speakers and ask questions or share your insights?”
Why it’s great: Nobody likes just a talking head. It’s important to foster learning through creating opportunities to engage and interact with speakers or content to reinforce understanding. This question give you a sense of whether the session was truly engaging and interactive, or not.
By using these core four questions on your keynote and session surveys, you’ll have a quick diagnostic view for your event. This will help you understand how session content aligned with attendee needs and expectations, as well as how speakers performed. Leveraging this data can help in future content planning, agenda creation, and experience design. It can also help identify which speakers to bring back to future events, and corrective actions you can put in place to improve the event moving forward. For more great content on event surveys, be sure to check out Event Survey Best Practices and Attendee Survey Best Practices.