5 essential workshop evaluation questions to ask attendees

After you’ve completed all the hard work necessary to run a successful workshop, you might wonder how well you or your organization did in getting your message across. Until you actually run the workshop, you’ll likely direct all of your energy toward getting people interested and involved so they want to attend. But you won’t know how successful you were or how to keep guests coming back unless you gather feedback with a survey full of thoughtful workshop evaluation questions. If you’ve gone through the steps to plan, market, and conduct a workshop, the process of setting up a survey will seem easy by comparison. But that doesn’t mean collecting feedback isn’t important. In fact, it’s probably one of the most valuable things you can do to improve future workshops. Read on to discover the reasoning behind a post-workshop survey and the right kind of questions to ask. We’ll also offer some tips for creating and hosting your survey when you’re ready to send it out.

Reasons for asking post-workshop survey questions

Running a successful workshop is similar to running a business. You can put your product together in the best way possible according to what you think your customer base needs, but until you get their feedback, you won’t know how they feel about it. While packing a venue full of engaged attendees is a great indicator you’ve done well, if your workshop didn’t end up meeting their needs, you might be speaking to an empty room the next time around. Without asking them to answer some workshop evaluation questions, you won’t have any idea why — and you won’t be able to resolve any issues. To get ahead of things before they become a problem, it’s a good idea to set up a post-workshop survey to send to all your attendees after the event. Here are some of the most essential questions to ask.

5 workshop evaluation questions to ask attendees

Every workshop has a different focus. Some of the questions you ask to determine how well a particular workshop addressed its topic of focus will be different for each workshop. However, there are some general workshop evaluation questions that should be in every post-workshop survey.

1. How satisfied were you with the workshop?

This is the most obvious question, but you should include it each and every time. This will give you a general idea of your attendees’ level of satisfaction and whether your workshop met their expectations.

2. Would you attend this workshop in the future?

While you’ll need to ask more in-depth questions elsewhere in the survey, if your attendees answer this question positively, it’s more likely they’ll come back. If someone answers no, review their other responses to find out why.

3. What was your level of satisfaction with each phase of the workshop?

Here, you can list the different phases and sections of your workshop. By breaking it down, you can home in on what exactly worked or didn’t work, instead of assessing the workshop as a whole. You can offer simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” response options or even allow attendees to rank each phase on a scale of 1–10.

4. What did you think of the workshop speakers?

An event like this is only as good as its presenters. Ask your attendees what they thought about the speaker(s), and you’ll know who to bring back for an encore in your next workshop.

5. What topics would you like to see covered in future workshops?

This is one of the most helpful workshop evaluation questions for one-time-only workshops, since you’ll likely get some good ideas on what topics to cover next. You can leave all the structural and logistical aspects of a successful workshop alone and focus on creating new content.

The easy way to build a workshop evaluation survey

You might need some help putting together a survey that includes your workshop evaluation questions. If that’s the case, try one of Jotform’s many workshop survey form templates to get started. You can use the workshop survey or workshop evaluation templates if you want to use a prebuilt survey template that you can customize and send out. There’s also a dedicated virtual workshop survey template if you’re going to host yours online. You can change the theme and color scheme to match your branding and customize the questions to fit your needs.

Jotform will help you collect your answers and can even share the data you collect with other integrated apps. If you like, you can even print out submissions from a PDF file. However you’d like to do it, asking the right workshop evaluation questions is a cornerstone to running successful future workshops. Get the feedback you need so you can prepare for an even more successful event in the future.