This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses/data from conference participants survey about exhibitor interactions. If you want to get useful insights, picking the right tools and prompts from the start really makes a difference for your survey analysis.
Choosing the right tools for analysis
The approach and tooling you need depends on the kind of data your survey produces. I like to start by breaking data into two buckets:
Quantitative data: Think multiple choice, rankings, or NPS scores—bits you can count. Tools like Excel or Google Sheets make it easy for you to build charts, tally booth visits, or see how many participants met with exhibitors. If your questions focus on "how many?", spreadsheets do the trick.
Qualitative data: This is the open text: comments about booth experiences, detailed feedback, or what drove attendees to visit (or avoid) certain exhibitors. Reading these answers one-by-one is impossible if you have more than a handful. That’s where AI tools shine: they find themes, summarize responses, and show you patterns a human reviewer would miss.
For qualitative responses, you essentially have two approaches for tooling:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
If you export your survey data, you can paste everything into ChatGPT or another GPT tool and ask questions about the responses. This lets you explore data conversationally—“What were some common compliments about exhibitors?”, “Did anyone mention poor signage?”—and get instant summaries or lists.
The downside: Copying and pasting large chunks of data isn’t convenient. You often need to slice your data, watch out for AI context limits, and there’s no seamless way to keep track of who asked which question or to collaborate with teammates in real time. Still, for small datasets, it’s a workable—and cost-effective—option.
All-in-one tool like Specific
An all-in-one tool like Specific is purpose-built for analyzing qualitative survey data. It doesn’t just let you launch surveys—it asks follow-up questions automatically, so you collect richer, more actionable feedback with less effort (here’s how automatic AI followups work).
With Specific:
AI analyzes all your conversations instantly: you get summaries, top themes, and can dive into what participants actually said.
You can “chat” directly with AI about your results, just like with ChatGPT. But since the data never leaves the platform, you keep context and privacy, and you can manage which data the AI sees.
If you want to see how this workflow looks, AI survey response analysis in Specific has visual walk-throughs and details on these features.
What’s really helpful is that this approach isn’t just for analysis—the conversation-powered interface can create your survey too (AI-powered survey generator), so you get consistency from data collection to results. Compare both approaches and use what fits your needs. According to recent industry research, 76% of exhibitors believe real-time attendee feedback is essential for optimizing event ROI [1], which makes choosing a robust and AI-powered platform all the more important.
Useful prompts that you can use for analyzing Conference Participants' feedback on Exhibitor Interactions
Regardless of which tool you use, having the right prompts saves hours. You’re not just asking “what did people say?”—you should ask for core ideas, trends, personas, and actionable insights with the right prompt design.
Prompt for core ideas: This works for big, messy datasets and is the default at Specific. Use it in ChatGPT, too:
Your task is to extract core ideas in bold (4-5 words per core idea) + up to 2 sentence long explainer.
Output requirements:
- Avoid unnecessary details
- Specify how many people mentioned specific core idea (use numbers, not words), most mentioned on top
- no suggestions
- no indications
Example output:
1. **Core idea text:** explainer text
2. **Core idea text:** explainer text
3. **Core idea text:** explainer text
AI always performs better if you give it more context. For example: “This survey measures how conference participants interacted with exhibitors. We’d like to identify common pain points and what worked best, to improve next year’s exhibitor experience.” Just add something like this above your prompt:
Here’s context: This is a survey of 200 conference participants, who attended a large international trade show. We want to know what drove meaningful engagement between attendees and exhibitors.
Dive deeper on a theme: Once you get your top ideas, ask: "Tell me more about ‘hands-on product demos’ (core idea)".
Prompt for specific topic: To validate if a theme appears, use: “Did anyone talk about exhibitor giveaways? Include quotes.”
For a survey on conference participants’ exhibitor interactions, these are particularly useful:
Prompt for personas: "Based on survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—like how product management uses personas. For each, summarize key characteristics, motivations, goals, and relevant quotes or patterns."
Prompt for pain points and challenges: "Analyze responses and list common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or how often they come up."
Prompt for motivations & drivers: "From the survey conversations, extract primary motivations, desires, or reasons participants express for their behaviors or choices. Group similar motivations, with supporting data."
You can also borrow these as needed:
Prompt for sentiment analysis: "Assess overall sentiment in responses (positive, negative, neutral). Highlight key feedback for each group."
Prompt for suggestions & ideas: "List all suggestions, ideas, or requests from participants. Organize by topic or frequency, with quotes."
Prompt for unmet needs & opportunities: "Look for unmet needs, gaps, or opportunities for improvement noted in responses."
If you want a full practical workflow with prompt examples, I go deeper in this guide to conference participant exhibitor surveys.
How Specific handles qualitative data by question type
I’m particular about matching the analysis to the structure of my survey. In Specific, how the AI summarizes and themes responses is tailored to the question’s type:
Open-ended questions (with or without followups): You get a clean summary of all responses—and, if you had AI-generated followups, the associated answers as well. That means you see not just the top comments but also richer stories that came from probing deeper (see the AI follow-up feature for why this matters).
Multiple choice with followups: For each response option, there’s a separate summary of all followup answers from people who chose it. You can compare why, say, “Decision makers” attended certain booths or what “First-time attendees” cared about most.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): Specific reports on promoters, passives, and detractors separately, compiling all their narrative answers so you spot unique motivators or complaints by group. This structure pulls out actionable event feedback you’d otherwise miss. You can generate a Conference Participant NPS survey for exhibitor interactions directly from the builder.
You can replicate this with ChatGPT, but it usually means more manual work splitting and prepping your data first. With the survey logic built-in, you get the right summary for each survey section without juggling multiple platforms or exports.
How to deal with AI context limits in survey analysis
If you’ve tried running a large conference survey through a GPT, you’ve seen context limit errors or AI skipping some responses. When an event brings in 500+ participant comments, that’s too much to cram into a single prompt—the AI can only “see” a certain number of tokens at once.
The best way to avoid this?
Filtering: Rather than sending everything, filter responses so only conversations including answers to key questions (or specific participant segments) are sent to the AI. This way, you focus on what matters most—and avoid context overload.
Cropping: Crop your analysis to 1–2 survey questions instead of sending the full dataset. This lets you zoom in on “What did attendees like about keynote exhibitors?” or “What were the top pain points discussed during demo sessions?” and still get a complete analysis.
Specific handles both filtering and cropping by default during analysis. You can apply filters on the fly—no need to export or reformat the data. This is crucial because only 55% of event organizers currently feel confident in their ability to accurately analyze feedback using traditional methods. [2]
If you’re doing this manually with spreadsheets and ChatGPT, be ready to split your raw data into smaller chunks that fit inside the token limit. I'll admit: it's tedious work, but still possible on a smaller scale.
Collaborative features for analyzing conference participants survey responses
Anyone who’s managed post-conference analysis for a team knows the pain: sharing giant spreadsheets back and forth, trying to keep track of everyone’s questions and interpretations. If you're working on exhibitor interaction surveys, things get even messier with dozens of insights to organize and debate.
Chat-driven analysis: In Specific, you analyze survey data by chatting with AI in a way that feels natural. Each team member can create their own chat, apply custom filters (like segmenting by attendee type or booth visited), and explore what matters most to their function—marketing, sales, or event logistics.
Multiple chats for teamwork: You can keep multiple chats active at once. Each one shows who created it, so everyone has clarity on which discussion belongs to whom—a massive upgrade from re-sharing files or writing email summaries.
Clear ownership and visibility: Each chat also shows the sender’s avatar, so when you return to the analysis, you instantly know who asked what. That means no stepping on toes or redoing work—and you build a living archive of what you’ve already discussed, all in one place. If you need to edit your survey collaboratively, the AI survey editor lets teams revise question flows instantly, just by chatting with the AI.
Want to create or test out a real-world survey? Try the conference participant exhibitor interactions survey generator to jumpstart your analysis with preset questions for this exact use case.
Create your Conference Participants survey about Exhibitor Interactions now
Start collecting real, actionable insights and let AI do the heavy lifting—create your conference participants survey on exhibitor interactions in minutes, tap into smart follow-ups, and get instant analysis made for real teams.