How to run a survey among attendees

An attendee survey, be it a rating after the event, a look at expectations before it or a quick question during it, is easiest to run in the SF-CONFERENCE system with an external form. An external form has an address of its own, which you send to attendees in a message, and it is filled in without logging in. The answers land in a table under the form, and if the survey does not ask for an email address, they are not tied to anyone. That makes ratings of talks, organisation or speakers more honest.

Below we go all the way: creating the survey and giving it an address, setting the dates, laying out the questions, sending attendees the link, what the respondent sees, and reading and exporting the answers.

An external form does not know who fills it in. If the answers have to be tied to the registrations of particular attendees, for example when only those who completed the survey should get a certificate, use a custom form, which the attendee fills in on their participation summary page. The guide on workshop sign-up through a custom form describes it.

Where to find external forms

Go to the Forms entry in the panel’s side menu. The view is split into three tabs: Standard forms with the registration form, Custom forms for people already signed up, and External forms. The survey belongs to the last one. The tab lists the forms created together with their status and creation date, and clicking a row opens the form’s page.

You can have as many external forms as you like and each works on its own, at its own address. A survey before the event, a survey after it and a call for talk proposals sit comfortably side by side.

Creating the survey and its address

The Add form button above the table opens a window in which you give a Name. The respondent sees it as the heading of the page, so it is worth saying plainly what it is about. Post-conference survey is better than Form 1. You give the name in every language of the event.

Once saved, the system opens the form’s page. The most important thing on it is the Path field. Into it you type a short fragment of an address, survey for example, and the system builds from it a full address of the shape /forms/survey in your event’s domain. The finished link is shown in a blue box at the top of the page, next to the words Form is available at. That is the link you send to attendees.

When the survey is open

The Form status field decides whether the survey can be filled in. Opened means no time limits, Closed stops accepting answers, and Opened conditionally reveals the From and To fields with a date and time. For a survey after the event this is the handiest choice: you set the window to a week after it ends and the survey closes by itself. While you are still laying out the questions, keep it closed so nobody lands on an unfinished version.

Below you will find three content editors. Content displayed at the beginning of the form appears above the first question. It is the place to explain why you are asking, how long it takes and whether the answers are anonymous. Content displayed at the end of the form appears below the last question, above the submit button, so it is a good place for a thank-you, and Content displayed when the form is closed replaces the survey after the deadline.

Questions, that is sections and fields

Below the settings sits the Sections and fields table with its Add section and Add field buttons. A section groups questions under a shared heading, and a field is a single question. Every field belongs to exactly one section, so the section has to be created first. A short survey needs only one; a longer one is worth splitting into topics, the programme separately, the organisation separately.

The add-field window asks for four things: the Input type, the Name (the wording of the question, in every language of the event), the Properties and the Section. Once saved, the system opens the field’s page, where you fill in the description and the answer options. The sections and fields table works the same way as in the registration form, so everything described in the guide on editing the registration form applies here too.

Question types worth using in a survey

A rating on a scale of one to five has no field type of its own and does not need one. Pick a Radio button group and add five options named 1 through 5. The respondent sees a row of buttons and picks one. The same type with the options Strongly agree, Rather agree, Rather disagree and Strongly disagree gives a classic Likert scale.

For the remaining questions the types you know from the registration form are enough. A Radio group shows the answers as an always-visible list, a Single select hides them in a dropdown, and a Multiple select lets several answers be ticked at once, for instance when asking which sessions someone took part in. A Text box collects free-form comments, and a Checkbox a single consent, for example to using a quote in promotional material.

On each question’s page it is worth filling in the Description, the smaller text under the question wording, in which you spell out what is being rated or in which direction the scale grows. Of the Properties, two matter in a survey. Required blocks the survey from being submitted without an answer to that question. Use it sparingly, because the more compulsory questions there are, the fewer completed surveys you get. Full width stretches the field across the whole form instead of laying it out in two columns, which reads far better for rating scales and longer comments.

Anonymous or named survey

Whether a survey is anonymous is decided by the questions themselves. With no field for an email address and no questions about first or last name, every answer is saved as a set of ratings tied to no one. Say so in the text at the start of the form, because people rate more honestly when they know nobody signs their rating.

If you want to know who answered, add a field of the email address type. The respondent then gets a message with a confirmation and a copy of their answers, and you can get back to them with a question. Independently of that, a notification about every new answer goes to the organizer.

Sending attendees a link to the survey

The survey has one address, shared by everyone, so the invitation is an ordinary message with that link. Go to the People entry in the side menu, tick the attendees in the first column of the table and click Send message to selected attendees. With nothing ticked the button reads Send message to all attendees and covers the whole list. The list honours the filters, so you can first narrow it down to a particular group, for example to the people who actually collected their badge.

In the message window you first pick its kind. Message template puts your text into the branded email template configured in the settings, and Own message sends it as the whole email, with its own Subject. Copy the survey address from the blue box on the form’s page and insert it with the Link button on the editor toolbar. Variables with the first and last name mean the message need not open with an impersonal Dear Sir or Madam.

Before you send the message to everyone, use the Send test message to yourself button and check that the link opens the survey. You can also show the same address on the last slide of the event or put it on its website.

How an attendee fills the survey in

The survey address opens a page with the event’s logo and background, your introduction and the questions, in the same order in which you laid them out in the panel. The attendee does not log in and does not create an account. They pick their answers and click Submit form, and the form is protected from bots by reCAPTCHA. After submitting they see a fixed system message confirming that the answers have been saved.

An external form does not recognise people, so nothing stops someone from filling it in a second time. In an anonymous survey that is the price of anonymity. If you want one answer per person, add a field with the email address and weed out repeats in the spreadsheet.

The answers in the panel

You will find every answer on the form’s page, in the Entries section below the fields table. Each row is one completed survey, and the columns are grouped by section names, just like the questions. Which of them are visible is set with the Edit entries table view button. Clicking a row opens the page of a single entry with all the answers.

Every entry also has a Status: New, Accepted or Rejected. It serves calls in which you decide on entries, so in a survey you can ignore it. If the survey collects an email address, changing the status sends the respondent a message about the decision, and that is rarely what you want in a survey.

Exporting the answers to an XLS file

The Download all records in XLS button above the entries table saves every answer to a spreadsheet. One completed survey is one row, and each question gets its own column headed with its wording, so you can work out a talk’s average rating or the spread of answers in the spreadsheet in a few minutes. The number of rows also tells you at once how many people answered.

Worth keeping in mind

Every entry from an external form, a completed survey included, takes a place from the attendee packet you ordered, just like a registration. So set the Entries limit to roughly the number of attendees and close the survey with a date by choosing Opened conditionally. A closed survey still works at its address and shows the text prepared for the occasion, so a late attendee learns that the survey has closed instead of landing on an empty page.

The attendee survey in short

An attendee survey comes down to five steps: create an external form, give it a path and a closing date, lay out the questions, send attendees a message with the survey address and collect the answers in the entries table or in an XLS file. More on external forms, including on accepting entries and moving submitters onto the attendee list, is in the guide on collecting entries through an external form.