Templates / Event feedback survey
Customers · Adaptive interview template
Event feedback survey template
Event feedback tends to arrive as a wall of stars and one comment saying "great event, thanks." That is nice to read and useless for planning the next one. The decisions an organizer actually faces are specific: which session to keep, which speaker to rebook, whether the networking block was too long or too short, and what almost made someone not come back.
This template gathers the reactions while they are fresh and lets the AI interviewer chase the moments behind the rating. Someone who ranks a keynote highest gets asked what specifically stuck with them; someone who says a session dragged gets asked what they expected instead. Ranking the parts of the event forces the trade-offs organizers have to make anyway, rather than letting everything score four stars.
When to use it
- Within a day of the event closing, while sessions are still vivid
- After a conference or multi-track event, to decide next year's agenda
- Following a webinar or workshop, to judge whether to run it again
- For a recurring event series, to compare reactions across editions
Running it well
- Send it within a day. Event recall fades fast, and next-week responses blur the sessions together.
- Use ranking rather than rating every session. Attendees rate everything a 4 out of politeness, but a ranking forces them to choose.
- Keep it short. People answer event surveys on the way home, so two or three anchors with follow-ups beats a long form nobody finishes.
- Tag the link by ticket type or track, for example ?ref=vip versus ?ref=general, so you can see how segments experienced the same event.
The questions, and why they're shaped this way
These are the anchor questions. You can edit, reorder, or add to them; the AI interviewer handles the depth between them.
Rank these parts of the event by how valuable they were to you.
Ranking forces the trade-offs a flat rating avoids, and Candor scores the top picks 3, 2, 1. That tells organizers what to protect and what to cut when time and budget are fixed.
What's one thing you'll remember from today?
The memorable moment is what marketing quotes and what attendees describe to a colleague. It surfaces the peak, and the follow-ups reveal why it worked.
How likely are you to recommend this event to a colleague?
A clean recommend signal for the event as a whole, kept alongside the ranking so you can connect who would return to which parts they valued most.
What the interviewer asks next
Follow-ups aren't scripted. The AI reads each answer and probes what a researcher would. Depending on what a respondent says, it might ask:
"You ranked the workshops highest. What made them more valuable than the sessions for you?"
"You said one session dragged. What did you expect from it that it didn't deliver?"
"You gave a lower recommend score. What would have needed to be different for you to bring a colleague next time?"
Live demo
Play the event feedback survey interview
This is the real interviewer, not a recording. Answer as yourself and watch the follow-ups adapt to what you write.
Prefer a full window? Open the demo.
Common questions
- When should I send an event feedback survey?
- Within 24 hours, ideally the same day. The specific memories you want, which session dragged and which speaker landed, decay quickly once attendees are back to their normal routine.
- Why rank sessions instead of rating each one?
- Ratings cluster at the top because attendees are being kind. Ranking forces the comparisons you actually make when planning the next agenda, and Candor scores the top picks 3, 2, 1 so priorities are clear.
- Can I run this for a virtual or hybrid event?
- Yes. Adjust the ranked options to fit the format, drop the venue line for a webinar, and the interviewer probes the same way. You can embed the first question in the follow-up email attendees already expect.
- What do the results look like?
- The ranked scores for each part, themes with quotes and counts from the open answers, the recommend distribution, full transcripts, and a plain-language box for questions like "what did people who loved the keynote say about it?"
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