How to Measure Attendee Satisfaction

For event marketers or any business unit organizing events, the main motive is to satisfy the attendees. The event's success, be it virtual, in-person or hybrid, depends upon multiple event strategies, but the key factor is to delight those who choose to attend your event.

The pandemic has led to a sudden surge in webinars, workshops and virtual events. In order to stay in the league, all B2B and many B2C businesses have weaved events and event marketing into their marketing strategies. Though most of us may be ready with a palette full of different event ideas, we may still wonder what the major but minute details we tend to miss are. Well, it is extremely important to measure event attendee satisfaction for all your events. It helps you to know which ideas and techniques helped to capture the attention of the event attendees and which ideas failed to do so. Measuring event attendee satisfaction leaves a lot of room for growth, evaluation and ideation.

The problem of coming up with the best event strategies for your business becomes easier if you consider evaluating quantitative and qualitative variables of event attendee satisfaction for all your events.

Often, people tend to confuse audience engagement with attendee satisfaction, but these are two completely different terms. In terms of execution, the former helps the latter. The key difference is that varying audience engagement tactics help create a more robust and insightful event attendee satisfaction analysis.

Without further ado, let's get to understand the KPIs for measuring event attendee satisfaction.

1 KPIs to Measure Event Attendee Satisfaction

Gauging the extent of the success of your events and measuring event attendee satisfaction will elevate your status as an event marketer or a business. The ways in which you can understand the level of attendee satisfaction are as follows:

1.1 Repeat Registrations

This is one of the most basic guides for knowing that your attendees keep an eye on your events. You know you successfully organized and hosted an event when your event attendees repeatedly show up for your upcoming events.

It is important to note that measuring your event's success does not necessarily have to be based upon the number of repetitive registrations in every event. Instead, it is just important to track the data of the attendees who register for your event multiple times.

You should always keep track of the attendees who show up for your events more than once because building a loyal customer base is important. In the case of events, an attendee base will be advantageous for your business and events.

One efficient marketing strategy to ensure that your attendees come back to you would be to offer discounted tickets upon registering or to give some other goodies during the event. Rewarding your loyal attendee base will help ignite the chain of word-of-mouth publicity of your brand, business and events.

1.2 Monitoring Live Social Media Activity

Social media is at the top of all kinds of marketing strategies because news and posts are immediately disseminated over social media platforms. Therefore, it is important to create pre-event and post-event buzz before and after your events, respectively.

When it comes to measuring event attendee satisfaction, social media plays an important role here, too. The ideal way to go about this would be to set up a social media or an engagement/networking hub where you can collect all content that is related to your event and is being circulated amongst the attendees. Capturing real-time sharing and buzz indicates how much engagement you were able to create via your event.

You can track the number of likes, tweets, and shares that your event content and posts have received pre-event, in real-time and post-event.

You can try to create marketing policies via monitoring social media activity. For example, you can tell your event attendees to share your event posts, content and reviews across their social media accounts and give discounts or a free ticket to an event to the attendee who has received the most likes by posting/promoting your content.

1.6 Real-Time Written Feedback

If you want a clear perception of what your attendees experience at your event, then session ratings alone are not enough. Suppose you keep a minimal but effective written feedback option for your event attendees. In that case, you can understand the problem areas of your event and decoding attendee satisfaction will be easier.

How can you collect written feedback? The best way to collect feedback would be to include 'response' text boxes post-event. Then, when attendees from different locations, backgrounds, gender and education come together for your event and provide you with written feedback, only then you will be able to solicit replies and understand what works for a collective audience. This will also help you to know what common activities people like or dislike and how to evolve and strategize for your upcoming events.

1.7 Post-Event Surveys

After session ratings and the collection of real-time, written feedback, post-event surveys seal the deal. If you are wondering why post-event surveys are important, we will answer that for you.

When you are collecting data for analysis, it must be in such a way that the collected data helps you analyze the following:

• Problem areas
• Strong points
• Gray areas

The answer to all the above points can only be tied together by the metric of post-event surveys. When you tabulate session ratings, written feedback and post-event surveys, you get a precise measure of your attendee satisfaction and the success of your event.

While sending out post-event surveys, some points are important and play a key role in extracting the real essence of the attendee experience. These points are as follow:

• Keep the form fields crisp and to a minimum.
• Use one-click options, ratings, scales or simple yes/no options rather than open-ended fields
• Multiple-choice or numeric scales are ideal because they help the attendee describe their experience quicker and more accurately.
• While collecting data and measuring attendee satisfaction, numeric data or simple multiple-choice answers help you to crack the data easily.

The KPIs mentioned earlier will help you measure your event attendee satisfaction easily, enabling you to come up with excellent event ideas, strategies, and marketing campaigns for your future events.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do you ask the right questions for your event plan?

Based on your business model and event marketing strategies, the questions you must ask can differ. However, the following are some basic questions that must be covered:

• What are the goals of my event?
• What type of event is the most suitable for my business?
• When is the best time for this event?
• What should be the theme for the event?
• What should be unique to my event?
• What services will I need in order to carry out the event?

2. What are the different categories of event surveys?

There can be three different types of event surveys:

1. Pre-event Surveys
2. Mid-event Surveys (these are rare)
3. Post-event Surveys

The surveys mentioned above can be carried out in these different ways:

1. Quantitative Questions–Number-driven or NPS scale-type questions that give you numerical responses or statistical data.
2. Qualitative Questions – Open-ended questions give you detailed insights into specific areas of experience which support the quantitative data.
3. Binary Questions – Simple Yes/No or checkbox-style questions which help add value to your surveys and gauge the extent of attendee satisfaction and choices.

3. What are the top three key elements to measure event satisfaction?

Though there are numerous KPIs to measure the success of your event, there are only a few important indicators:

1. Event check-ins
2. Event Surveys (Can be pre-event, mid-event or post-event)
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)