Structuring a satisfaction questionnaire for participants: 5 golden rules

Here we are, the event that you organized with commitment, dedication and certainly a little effort has just ended. Now, however, the time has come to gather the impressions of the participants and understand what satisfied them and what, on the other hand, they would have liked to have gone differently.  

If you're wondering what the best way to do this is, the answer is simple: give them a questionnaire. 

Structuring a satisfaction questionnaire with the correct questions will give you the opportunity to collect more accurate feedback and understand what went well and what, instead, you need to improve in view of the next event. 

What is the best time to administer a questionnaire?

Usually to get more accurate feedback it is necessary that the participants have "processed" the experience. 

A questionnaire administered immediately at the exit of the event will be influenced by irrational responses due to the emotions (positive and / or negative) that the participants are still feeling. At the same time, administering a questionnaire too far from the event will be counterproductive in obtaining accurate feedback. 

The best thing to do is to allow participants 4-5 days to subconsciously process the experience and then ask them for feedback. 

What questions should I ask attendees? 

The moment you start thinking about which questions to submit to the participants, remember why you are administering a questionnaire and what you want to get out of it: collect data to understand what went well during your event and what needs to be improved.

The best way to do this is to try to get as many quantitative answers as possible, so that you can later download and analyze them via a spreadsheet.    

Unfortunately, the reality of the facts must be taken into consideration, namely that people tend to be particularly listless when it comes to answering a questionnaire. 

Don't worry though, the purpose of this article is precisely to help you structure simple but at the same time valuable questions, to get the best out of your questionnaire thanks also to the advice we received from a marketing guru like Marco Sorrentino. 

The 5 golden rules for structuring a satisfaction questionnaire for participants

1. To lower the likelihood of respondents abandoning the questionnaire, it is essential that the questions are simple and that they do not require too much comprehension effort. Therefore, try to avoid double negatives and too long sentences.  
2. The best type of questions to test the degree of satisfaction of an event is the one that sees the measurement scales as a response method. However, it is essential that the scales have the same interval for the entire duration of the questionnaire; e.g. scales from 1 to 5. 
3. Nobody wants to answer too many questions. When designing a questionnaire it is important to find the right balance between the number of questions and what you want to achieve from them. For a reference, we advise you not to exceed 15 questions.  
4. Textual answers and open questions as well as not being able to be processed by a computer tend to "tire" the respondents. So try to avoid them at least if they are not of fundamental importance. 
5. To be more sure that respondents are completing the questionnaire consistently, try to structure questions with the same purpose, placing them in different points of the questionnaire. 

Conclusions

Structuring a satisfaction questionnaire in the correct way is essential to obtain accurate feedback and understand what went well during the event and what did not satisfy the participants. 

Among the many features that the platform Letz Fair offers, there is also the possibility of interacting with participants and obtaining opinions thanks to fully customizable and interactive surveys. 

In fact, the questionnaires can be sent to specific segments of the public. For example, if you want to know the degree of satisfaction of a specific speech given by a guest, you will have the possibility to send the questionnaire only to those who have attended that particular speech. 

Furthermore, thanks to the possibility of inserting multimedia elements such as images, audio and video files into the questionnaires, you can make the experience of the respondents unique. 

All these actions can be safely managed and carried out while remaining within the platform, without having to use external software. 

To get constructive feedback on your events and improve attendee satisfaction, request a demo.