This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from an event attendee survey about safety using AI-powered approaches. You'll learn which tools work best for handling different types of survey data and how to get actionable insights.
Choosing the right tools for survey data analysis
How you analyze event attendee survey responses about safety depends on the structure of your data. Here’s how I break it down:
Quantitative data: If your survey has questions like “Did you feel safe at the event?” with yes/no or multiple-choice options, you’re dealing with quantitative data. For these, Excel or Google Sheets are perfect for counting how many attendees picked each answer and visualizing trends.
Qualitative data: Open-ended questions and follow-up responses (“What made you feel unsafe?”) generate qualitative data. Reading hundreds of these entries isn’t practical. You need AI tools to make sense of this at scale, especially when safety is a top priority—studies show 83% of event organizers consider attendee safety their main concern in the post-pandemic era. [1]
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Copy-paste approach: You can export your qualitative survey data and paste it into ChatGPT or other GPT tools. This method lets you chat with AI about your responses, craft prompts, and surface patterns.
Drawbacks: Managing exports, formatting data, and breaking up responses can get messy fast. Context limits in these tools often mean you have to split your data into multiple chats, which risks missing patterns across the dataset. You’ll also need to carefully craft prompts for nuanced insights, otherwise you’ll miss the good stuff hiding in detailed attendee comments.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built for survey analysis: Specific is an AI tool designed to collect and analyze survey data in one place. When you use it to create an event attendee safety survey, it automatically asks smart follow-up questions, which makes your results richer and more reliable. Follow-up questions are a game-changer for unlocking real context around safety issues.
Instant, actionable AI-powered analysis: Once responses roll in, Specific’s AI-powered summaries show you the core themes and explainers for every question—no spreadsheet headaches. You can chat directly with the AI about the results, just like with ChatGPT, but with added context and no manual data wrangling. Filters, search, and multiple analysis chats help you zero in on the most important attendee feedback and safety gaps.
Collaboration and quality: Sharing analysis and collaborating across your event team is baked in. This makes tools like Specific ideal as more organizers are increasing their use of AI-powered tools—48% plan to ramp up AI use for event planning in 2024, seeking stronger safety protocols and insights.[4]
Useful prompts that you can use for analyzing event attendee safety survey responses
Getting quality insights from your safety survey depends on asking AI the right questions. Here are effective prompt templates I regularly use for event data:
Prompt for core ideas: My go-to for surfacing top safety concerns or best practices from bulk attendee responses. Paste this into your AI tool or the chat in Specific:
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
More context improves results: AI analysis works much better if you clarify your survey’s background, purpose, or goals. Here’s an example:
Analyze these responses from an event attendee survey about safety. The survey was conducted after a 500-person conference where attendees reported some concerns about crowd management and emergency exits. My goal is to surface top attendee safety concerns and actionable improvements.
Dive deeper into core ideas: If the AI listed “Emergency exit confusion” as a top concern, you can ask: “Tell me more about Emergency exit confusion—what did respondents mention?”
Prompt for specific topic: To check if attendees mentioned a particular safety protocol or incident:
Did anyone talk about emergency staff visibility? Include quotes.
Prompt for pain points and challenges:
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:
Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.
Prompt for sentiment analysis:
Assess the overall sentiment expressed in the survey responses (e.g., positive, negative, neutral). Highlight key phrases or feedback that contribute to each sentiment category.
Prompt for personas: Especially valuable if your attendee group is diverse (VIPs, speakers, first-timers):
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.
You can use all of these directly in Specific’s AI chat, or drop them into your GPT of choice for fast, deep safety survey analysis. For even more prompt inspiration, check out our guide to the best questions for event attendee safety surveys.
How to analyze different question types in Specific
Open-ended questions with or without followups: Specific gives you an instant, AI-generated summary of all attendee responses, including separate breakdowns for each follow-up question. This surfaces key safety topics even in very long-form answers.
Choice questions with followups: Each choice (e.g., selected safety protocols) gets a dedicated summary based on the follow-up responses tied to that specific option. This lets you pinpoint safety gaps or best practices for each area attendees care about.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): For NPS-based safety surveys, you get group-level summaries for each segment (detractors, passives, promoters), so you can compare what makes some attendees feel safe and others identify issues. You’ll see instant patterns, without manual tagging or endless reading.
You can do similar analysis steps using ChatGPT or other GPT tools—it just takes extra manual effort to prepare the data and prompt the AI for each segment or question type. If you want details on crafting safety-specific NPS surveys, see our NPS survey builder for event attendees.
Solving AI context limits when analyzing large safety surveys
AI tools can only process a certain amount of data (“context”) at one time. For big safety surveys with hundreds of open-ended event attendee responses, you’ll quickly run into these limits.
Specific tackles this in two ways so you get high-quality analysis, even with large datasets:
Filtering: Filter conversations to include only responses where participants answered selected safety-related questions or picked certain options. This trims down your dataset for focused analysis.
Cropping questions for AI analysis: Select just the most important questions for the AI to analyze, ensuring the context window stays manageable. This way, you can review more attendee input without losing resolution or running into context-size roadblocks.
These methods let you scale your safety analysis in a tool like Specific and avoid AI hallucinations or missed insights. For more on creating your own custom event safety surveys, try our AI survey generator.
Collaborative features for analyzing event attendee survey responses
Collaboration on safety data analysis for events is always tricky, especially when teams work across departments or remote locations.
Instantly share insights: In Specific, you analyze survey data by chatting directly with the AI, and you can set up multiple chats for different analysis angles or event segments. Each chat keeps a record of who started it—so everyone can see which team member explored which attendee safety topic.
Transparent teamwork: When collaborating, you always know who said what: AI chats show each message with the sender’s avatar, ensuring no mix-ups during review sessions. This streamlines feedback cycles and lets safety, operations, and leadership teams work together efficiently—raising implementation rates. Even as 67% of event organizers add explicit safety and security language to event policies, only 38% have formal risk assessment plans, so communication is critical to close this gap. [2][5]
Better, faster analysis rounds: By freezing key safety insights or attaching notes directly in analysis chats, you keep everyone on the same page while prepping for your next meeting or post-event review.
Explore more about how to create a great event attendee safety survey and see how to edit or iterate safety surveys with AI-driven chat tools for even better team science.
Create your event attendee survey about safety now
Get actionable safety insights from your next event by using an AI-driven, conversational survey approach that captures what matters most to attendees—then transforms responses into clear, collaborative analysis for your team.