Post-Event Survey Template

The 48 hours after an event are a closing window: attendees still remember the wifi password, which talk ran long, and exactly how the coffee queue felt. This survey is built to be sent inside that window and finished in under two minutes, because post-event response rates collapse with every passing day.

Why it opens with attendance mode. Hybrid events produce split experiences — a five-star day in the hall can be a two-star stream online. Capturing how someone attended lets you separate the scores later instead of averaging two different events into one misleading number. The overall 1–5 scale comes immediately after, while the general impression is still uncontaminated by the detailed questions that follow.

The matrix does the heavy lifting. One grid rates keynote, breakouts, networking, venue, and catering on a shared scale, with an explicit "Skipped it" column — the honest escape hatch that keeps people from rating sessions they never saw. The highlight question balances the improvement question: organizers consistently underestimate how useful it is to know what worked, since that is what you protect in next year's budget. The recommendation score gives you an event NPS to trend across editions, and return intent is your earliest registration forecast.

Read the two forward-looking numbers together. Recommendation and return intent sound like the same question and diverge in useful ways. High recommendation with soft return intent usually means the content served its purpose — attendees got what they came for and are done, which is fine for a training day and alarming for an annual flagship. Strong return intent with lukewarm recommendation suggests habit or obligation rather than enthusiasm, the profile of an event coasting on calendar inertia.

What we left out. Speaker-by-speaker ratings (they belong on per-session cards, not the general survey), demographic questions (your registration data already has them), and mandatory open comments — both text questions are optional, because a required essay at question eight is where completions go to die.

Who uses this. Conference and meetup organizers, internal events teams closing out an offsite, workshop hosts, and community managers who promised sponsors a satisfaction number and need it to be real.

Make it yours. Rename the matrix rows to your actual program — "Day 1 workshops", "The afterparty", "Sponsor expo" — and adjust the ending to link to photos or slides as the thank-you. Send the link the same evening, then set the form to close automatically after a week so the dataset reflects fresh memory only. The Summary view gives per-row counts at a glance; export the CSV to split every score by attendance mode. If your event repeats, clone this form each edition and keep wording identical — the year-over-year trend is what makes a single edition's score meaningful.