Survey Inspiration
Post event survey
The most popular type of survey that we see is the post event survey. This is where an organisation reaches out to attendees and/or participants that they have recently engaged with, to understand the outcomes achieved by an event, place or program based on their experiences.
This can also be helpful in determining audience demographics, capturing feedback on their experiences and behaviours, and in measuring the success of marketing methods.
Annual survey
Annual surveys give you the opportunity to reach out to your database as a whole, and potentially capture responses from members who aren’t engaged currently, rather than sampling only the audiences that have recently attended your events.
Annual surveys can ask ‘big picture’ questions about general behaviour and more specifically, engagement with your organisation. Some examples of questions that may be useful to your future programming and marketing strategies include:
Approximately how many times a year do you visit?
- Approximately how many times a year do you visit ? Question type: Number
- Which of the below programs and initiatives have you previously heard of? Question type: Multiple Choice
- What have been your reasons for attending ? / What have been your reasons for not attending ? Question type: Multiple Choice
- Overall perceptions of your organisation using your dimension statements. Question type: Slider
Example survey – try it for yourself!
Here is an example of a general survey created for a demo arts organisation called Gallery One, based in Sydney for the purpose of this example. Try this survey from both perspectives; as someone who has attended the organisation within the last 12 months, and as someone who hasn’t. This is an example of how you can incorporate some market research methods into your general survey to understand who out of your current database are currently engaging, where they are located (local, national, or international), and gather general demographics along with your outcome data.
Once you have a general survey set up for your organisation, you could use this as a template and consider distributing this once each year to compare year-on-year results. This comparative data could be helpful in giving your organisation a ‘sense’ check of the level of engagement of your wider database.
Survey templates
Our preset survey templates are a great way to set out a framework for your survey, based on the context of your event.
The questions that are asked in a public event, workshop, volunteer or artist survey (to name a few) may differ slightly, so templates are helpful in the sense that they take the guesswork out of best-practice evaluation techniques and are easily duplicated for future events. These templates also help you to remain consistent across evaluations, making it easier to benchmark and compare results long term.
You can also create dimension lists for specific evaluation activities by using the ‘Dimension Selector’ feature on the platform, which is a handy function that automatically prefills your chosen dimensions into new surveys. Simply choose the relevant dimension list from the ‘Use dimension list’ dropdown in the ‘Create an evaluation’ template function featured above. You can find out more about the Dimension Selector and how to compile survey dimensions lists here.