This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses/data from conference participants survey about future topics interest. If you're looking to turn raw responses into actionable insights, you're in the right place.
Choosing the right tools for analyzing responses
The approach and tooling you need depends on what kind of data you get from your Conference Participants survey about future topics interest. Here’s how I break it down:
Quantitative data: If your survey includes rating scales or multiple-choice questions (for example, “Which topics are most relevant to you?”), that’s easy to count. Conventional tools like Excel or Google Sheets work great for slicing and dicing those numbers.
Qualitative data: Open-ended responses or detailed follow-ups are another story. If you collect those (which you should—you’ll get deeper insights), reading through them gets overwhelming, fast. Here’s where AI tools become essential—not just for volume, but for finding true meaning. With 70% of event organizers reporting that attendee experience is their top priority, harnessing qualitative feedback effectively is not optional. [1]
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
The DIY route: You can copy the exported survey data and paste it into ChatGPT or another large language model tool. Then, you chat with it—“What are the top themes?” or “What do attendees want to see next?”
But: It’s clunky. Managing long transcripts or CSVs, limitations on context size, and the manual work to group responses or compare segments can really slow you down. And, unless you prompt carefully, getting actionable breakdowns by session, persona, or interest is tough.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built for surveys: An AI tool like Specific is designed specifically for collecting and analyzing conversational survey responses.
Supercharged data collection: As you set up your survey, Specific automatically asks smart AI follow-up questions—so responses have richer detail, making analysis sharper. Read more about automatic follow-ups here.
Instant analysis: After responses come in, Specific’s AI summarizes all the answers, finds common themes, surfaces outliers, and lets you chat with the results—just like ChatGPT, but fine-tuned for real survey data. You can filter, segment, and dig into the data without ever opening a spreadsheet.
Manage what AI sees: You control which data gets sent to AI (for example, only certain questions), making it easy to get concise, high-quality results even if you’ve collected a mountain of feedback.
Overall, using AI for survey analysis is quickly becoming the norm—research shows event organizers who leverage these tools make smarter adjustments to their agendas and networking sessions, leading to greater attendee satisfaction and stronger return attendance. [2] You can find a step-by-step guide to setting up a conference participants survey about future topics interest here.
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze conference participants’ survey responses
Getting actionable insights from your qualitative survey data starts with the right prompts. Here are the ones I rely on (and what I recommend to Specific users, but they'll work in ChatGPT, too):
Prompt for core ideas: This works wonders for boiling down large sets of conference feedback to the main themes.
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 gives you better results with context. For example, if your survey was for academic conferences but your goal is to increase networking opportunities, lead with that information:
These responses are from a survey of conference participants at last month’s industry event. My goal is to identify the key future topics attendees want to see at sessions, plus any feedback on session formats or networking. Please focus on actionable conference agenda improvements.
“Tell me more about XYZ (core idea)”—A great follow-up to any summary prompt. Let’s say “Emerging Tech” was a big theme. Ask the AI for deeper breakdowns (“What exactly did people say about this?”) to uncover underlying interests.
Prompt for specific topic: Use this to quickly see if anyone cares about a particular subject:
Did anyone talk about artificial intelligence as a future session topic? Include quotes.
Prompt for personas: Use this when you want to group your respondents by attendee type:
Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—similar to how "personas" are used in product management. For each persona, summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed in the conversations.
Prompt for pain points and challenges: This is perfect for surfacing what frustrates people about a conference:
Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.
Prompt for suggestions & ideas: Go straight for all improvement suggestions—almost always useful for future planning:
Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.
Explore more about setting up effective prompts (and automating these in your workflow) in this article on the AI survey generator for conference participants.
How Specific summarizes qualitative data for each question type
Specific is built for survey response analysis and handles every question type with tailored summaries. Here’s what happens when you analyze data from conference surveys:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): Specific summarizes all responses, combining the main answers and any follow-up conversations into concise themes. You get a direct synthesis of what people said, what they meant, and why.
Choice questions with follow-ups: Each choice option gets a dedicated summary, aggregating all relevant follow-up comments—so you know not just what was chosen, but why.
NPS questions: Every NPS group (detractors, passives, promoters) gets its own summary of follow-up responses, letting you spot drivers of satisfaction or frustration at a glance.
You could follow a similar manual process in ChatGPT, but it’s a lot of copy-pasting, exporting, and re-prompting—Specific removes all that grunt work with a single click. Learn more about how to edit and update surveys using natural language.
How to handle AI context limits with large conferences
Big events often mean hundreds of survey responses. AI models like GPT have limits on how much data they can process at once. Here’s how you can address this without losing insight (and how Specific handles it automatically):
Filtering: Select just the conversations where participants responded to a particular question or chose a certain option. This not only focuses the analysis, it keeps the dataset manageable within AI context limits.
Cropping: Send only specific questions from all conversations to AI—so if you're just interested in future topic suggestions, that's all the AI sees, no wasted space.
Combining these two lets you scale up analysis—get the most out of 500+ attendee responses without ever seeing an "input too long" error. For details, check out AI survey response analysis in Specific.
Collaborative features for analyzing conference participants survey responses
When you’re working with a team—editors, event organizers, or subject matter experts—the hard part isn’t always finding what attendees said, but sharing insights and collaborating smoothly.
Multi-chat workflow: In Specific, you can spin up multiple AI chats for one survey: each can have its own focus (“Keynote feedback”, “Future topics: technical”, “Networking events”), with its own data filters. It’s easy to see who started each chat and what questions they asked.
See who said what: Each message in your chat-based analysis shows the sender’s avatar, so you always know who asked for what insight or summary. Ideas don’t get lost—they're surfaced to the whole team.
Seamless adoption for event workflows: Collaborate live or asynchronously. Perfect for remote teams or distributed event planning committees working on large conference programs. You can get more guidance on useful Conference Participants survey questions that drive collaboration in this guide.
Create your conference participants survey about future topics interest now
Get reliable, AI-powered insights into what your attendees truly want—and start building better, more engaging conference agendas in minutes. Capture deeper feedback, analyze it instantly, and collaborate seamlessly with your team using the right tools for the job.