A Post Event Survey of Six Questions People Will Actually Answer

Most post event surveys fail for one reason: they are too long. A post event survey of six questions, sent within a day, gets finished. A twenty question form sent a week later gets opened, scrolled and abandoned. If you want answers you can act on, ask less and ask sooner.

Here are the six, in the order that works.

The six questions

1. Would you come again? Yes, no, maybe. Put it first because it is the easiest question in the world and answering it pulls people into the rest of the form. It is also the single most useful answer you will collect.

2. Would you tell a friend to come? Almost the same question, but not quite. Plenty of people enjoy something they would not recommend. A gap between question one and question two usually means the event was fine but not distinctive.

3. What was the best part? One line, free text. Do not offer a list of options. The words people choose without prompting are the words you should use in next year's poster.

4. What nearly stopped you coming? This is the money question. Not "what went wrong", which invites polite silence, but the thing that almost kept them home. Parking, timing, the walk from the bus stop, not knowing if it was for families. Every answer here is a repeatable fix. If price keeps coming up, it belongs in next year's break even maths.

5. How did you first hear about it? Give four or five options that match the channels you actually used, including your EventifyPlus listing if you have one, plus "other". This is your cheapest attribution.

6. Anything else? Leave it open and leave it optional. Most people skip it. The ones who fill it in are your most engaged attendees, and occasionally your next volunteer.

When to send it

Send it the same evening or the next morning, while the day is still fresh and the phone is still in hand. Waiting a week costs you responses and blurs the detail. If your event ran late into the night, as many Kerala festival programmes do, the morning after is better than midnight.

One reminder, two days later, to people who have not answered. One. Not three.

WhatsApp or email

Both work, and they work differently.

WhatsApp reaches people where they already are, and in Kerala it is often the channel the whole event was organised on anyway. Messages get seen fast. The catch is that a long form link feels intrusive in a personal chat, and sending to a list of individuals is slow unless you already have a broadcast setup.

Email is easier to send in bulk and easier to ignore. It suits ticketed events where you collected addresses at booking and people expect to hear from you.

We are not going to quote you a response rate for either. Published survey response figures swing wildly depending on how warm the audience is, whether the event was free, and how the link was worded, so an average from somewhere else would not tell you what to expect at your event. Do this instead: send by both channels on your first edition, tag the two links differently, and count. After one event you will have your own number, which is the only one that applies to you.

Small things that raise the finish rate

• Say how long it takes, in the first line, and be honest. One minute means one minute.
• Ask the name last, or not at all. Asking for identity first makes people cautious.
• Make every question except one optional. Only "would you come again" should be required.
• Send it from a person, not from a committee. "This is Anu from the organising team" gets more replies than "Dear attendee".
• Say what you will do with the answers. People answer when they believe the form goes somewhere.

What to do with the answers

Read the free text first, before you look at any counts. Six or seven answers to "what nearly stopped you coming" will usually cluster into two or three real problems, and those problems are your task list for the next edition.

Then count the yes answers to question one. That number, tracked from year to year, is a better health check for a small event than any total attendance figure, because attendance can be inflated by weather, a holiday or a bigger event being cancelled nearby. Intent to return cannot.

Finally, share one finding publicly. A short post saying "you told us the parking was a mess, so here is what we are doing" earns more goodwill than the survey cost you, and makes the next one easier to send.