Feedback collected a week later is a memory of a feeling. How to ask per session, what to ask, realistic response rates, and how to read scores without over-reacting.
The single survey emailed after the event measures how people felt on the way home. Useful, but it will not tell you which of forty sessions to repeat and which speaker to invite back.
A one-tap rating at the end of each session, on the phone already in their hand, gets 20–40% response. The same question a week later gets 5–10%, and only from people who felt strongly — which biases the result towards the extremes.
If you want one more, ask "would you recommend this session to a colleague?" — closer to behaviour than satisfaction.
Send each speaker their own scores and comments within a week — see briefing speakers. And tell attendees, at next year's event, what you changed because of what they said. "You asked for longer breaks; here they are" is the most effective thing you can put in an opening address, and it doubles next year's response rate.
Session ratings, crossed with attendance, are the clearest guide you have to next year's themes: high attendance and low ratings means the topic is right and the treatment was wrong; low attendance and high ratings means you buried something good in a small room. That analysis belongs in the post-event report.
Gathervo collects per-session ratings from the attendee's own schedule and reports them against attendance. Try it free.
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