What Kinds Of Surveys Could I Use In A Virtual Event?
Nothing is better than hearing feedback directly from your attendees as you plan your successful virtual event. Surveys are a reliable source of information that event planners utilize to learn about their event’s success, attendee suggestions, and to improve the event.
But no matter how successful your virtual event was, it can be challenging to get your target audience to fill out those precious surveys.
This is where survey design comes into play. When formulating survey questions for your next virtual event, every word you use matters, so you need to think about your vocabulary, answer type, and the order of questions because all of these factors can have a significant impact on your response rate.
If you don’t choose wisely, you could end up with a biased or worthless survey and miss a valuable opportunity to make future virtual events even better.
When planning your next virtual event, take a step back and look for opportunities to survey your event attendees. This allows you to gather actionable data, which you can present to key stakeholders.
Plus, you can use survey question responses to help guide future virtual events because you can tap into the needs of attendees at each step of the way.
It can be overwhelming to think about the type of survey questions to ask attendees, so let’s take a look at some of the most popular types of surveys virtual event planners use:
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Pre-Event Survey: Get to know your audience before the event begins.
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Market Research: Gathering critical market data using a survey as a marketing research tactic.
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Post-Event Survey: Once your event has concluded, provide a survey to gather participant feedback.
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Customer Satisfaction Survey: Ask your customers how they feel about your brand or a new product.
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Rate Session Questionnaire: After each breakout session, have audience members and exhibitors quickly share their initial thoughts on how the session went.
What Are The Best Types Of Survey Questions?
No matter what online survey type you choose, it all boils down to asking good survey questions. This means using strategic questions in various types to ensure you get the information you need by reducing friction for attendees as they share their experiences and thoughts with you.
Let’s take a look at five different types of survey questions that will increase your response rate and collect essential survey data.
1. Multiple Choice Questions
You can use a form of tests and quizzes to engage with event attendees to hear about their feedback. These types of surveys are the easiest ones to implement, and you should consider multiple-choice survey questions as the core of your survey efforts.
There are two types of multiple-choice questions: one allows respondents to choose a single answer, the other encourages the user to pick multiple answer options. It’s easy to design these survey questions because you can format them as a dropdown menu or checkbox.
Multiple-choice questions are excellent for demographic survey questions or dichotomous questions where respondents can only choose from two options, like yes/no questions. Here are some quick tips to help you make valuable multiple-choice survey questions:
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Keep It Simple
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Use Clear Wording
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Don’t Overlap Responses
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Limit Number Of Answer Choices
2. Open-Ended Questions
Open-ended questions allow respondents to answer questions in their own words in a dedicated text box. These questions are helpful because the respondent’s answer is not based on the survey creator’s assumptions. These types of questions are great because it provides attendees with a way to send you specific thoughts and feedback right from the survey box!
Although these questions are more time-consuming to answer and analyze, they provide essential, authentic feedback. Use this questioning to gain customer feedback, opinions, and suggestions.
Remember that you may receive some one-word responses, blank boxes, or an answer to a different question altogether. However, those who take the time to answer the question will provide invaluable data key stakeholders want to know that may not be obvious with other survey results.
Open-ended survey questions are valuable, but they usually result in limited response rates due to the amount of effort required on the part of attendees.
Here are some tips to increase engagement and improve the quality of responses when using open-ended questions:
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Don’t Ask Leading Questions
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Keep Language Simple
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Ask Specific Questions
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Limit Number Of Open-Ended Responses Per Survey
3. Matrix Questions
These types of questions are the most commonly used on a post-event survey. Using Likert scale questions, which offer different response choices like strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree, this question type has respondents communicate their feelings about your event or likelihood to accomplish a task.
Here are a few of our favorite tips that you can use to write matrix survey questions for your next virtual event:
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Keep Response Options Short
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Offer 5 Or Fewer Answer Choices
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Make Item Wording Shirt
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Use Consistent Verbiage
Use these questions to gather data on the opinion of your respondents. Interval scale questions are the perfect choice to discover how they feel and how satisfied they were with your event as a whole, as well as different parts of your virtual event.
4. Ratio Rating Scale Questions
Ratio scale questions ask survey respondents to answer a measurable way on a semantic differential scale or numeric point scale. You’ve most likely seen these types of questions about income, age, or hours spent doing an activity.
When you want to find out how many hours a day your respondents spent on a computer or their income bracket, ratio scale questions are your best bet. You can make the most out of rating scale questions in your virtual events by following a few of these simple tips:
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Clarify The Scale Endpoints
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Make one the “pain” and five the “positive.”
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Use brief, consistent language.
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Measure One Element At A Time
5. Ordinal Questions
When you need your survey respondents to choose from an ordered set or rank a group of items, ordinal scale questions will do the trick.
Ordinal scale questions, or ranking questions, are helpful when you want to determine the importance level of each individual. When setting up this question, you need to identify your number scale. For example, communicate that 1 is the first choice and five is the last.
This question type will help you gather data by allowing respondents to place critical items in a specific order to communicate how much importance they place on each component. Ordinal survey questions can be tricky to pull off, but you can get valuable information from attendees by using a few of these great tips:
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Identify Your Focus
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Choose A Singular Variable
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Create A Set Of Ordered Responses
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Keep It Simple And Consistent
Create An Effective Survey For Your Next Virtual Event Today
Once you know your way around the different types of questions, you’ll realize the potential of using surveys in your next virtual event. Use your virtual event platform to find premade survey templates, administer your survey and gather the data with ease.
Because each question type gathers a different piece of data from your respondents, it’s essential to use a variety to gather all the information you need.
Learning to choose the correct type of survey questions for your purpose helps you focus on obtaining the most relevant information you need to plan your next successful virtual event.