Events
Event surveys
With an event survey the hard part is not what to ask, it is when. Response rates fall by the hour from the moment people walk out of the door: a QR code at the exit, on the closing slide or on the wristband collects more answers than an email the following Tuesday. Decide before the event how you will collect feedback, have the survey published and the QR printed the day before, and ask few things, because the people answering are on their feet with their coat already on.
The templates
The window is hours, not days
While people are still on site they answer; once they get home, they do not. That is why email is rarely the best channel: a large QR code at the exit, on the closing slide or in the printed programme beats it, with the link already live the day before. If you are going to send an email as well, send it that same night or the next morning, never on Tuesday. And if the event runs several days, collect every day, not only at the end.
Registration and feedback are separate
They are two instruments with different jobs. Registration exists to organise: how many are coming, which sessions they pick, allergies, whether they need an invoice. The post-event survey exists to measure an experience that already happened. Put opinion questions in the registration form and people rate something they have not lived yet; ask for logistics afterwards and you lengthen the questionnaire exactly when patience is shortest. Each one stops once it has done its job.
The speakers and the queue
You want to know how the programme went; the person who attended wants to talk about the queue at the door, the food and the wifi. Ask about both explicitly, or the open question fills up with logistics complaints and you read the speaker rating as if it explained everything. Calibrate length by audience too: a corporate event will take fifteen questions because there is a relationship behind it; at a festival, battery in the red, you get six.