This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from an event attendee survey about venue suitability. If you're running surveys and want clear, actionable insights, there are faster, smarter ways to go about it now—especially when you use AI tools.
Choosing tools for event survey analysis: what matters
Your approach—and the tools you’ll use—depends on the kind of data your event attendee survey collects.
Quantitative data: If you’re tallying straightforward responses like attendance numbers or rating scales (“How suitable was the venue?”), classic tools like Excel or Google Sheets are perfect. Just count, chart, and filter.
Qualitative data: When you ask open-ended questions (“What did you wish was different about the venue?” or follow-ups to ratings), you usually get a mountain of text data. Reading every response becomes impractical—especially as your event grows—so you need AI-powered tools that can summarize, cluster, and pull insights from the noise.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
You can export your survey responses and paste them into ChatGPT (or a similar large language model) for analysis. This lets you interactively ask questions, get core themes, or even request a summary. However, this workflow isn’t ideal when handling large datasets or juggling many follow-up questions.
If your survey has lots of responses, managing context limits, cleaning up the data, and extracting granular themes (e.g., by event type or attendee persona) can get messy and time-consuming. Direct copy-pasting also makes it easy to introduce formatting errors or omit necessary context, which muddles your results.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Platforms like Specific are built for this exact workflow. You can both launch surveys (using a conversational, AI-powered interface that feels like a chat) and analyze responses with AI. When you collect data, Specific automatically asks smart follow-up questions, which means you get richer, more contextually relevant answers—without planning every probe up front.
Analysis is instant. Responses are summarized, key topics are surfaced, and core ideas are grouped—no more manual spreadsheet wrangling. You can chat directly with the AI about results (just like ChatGPT), but you also get tools for applying filters, managing context, and keeping everything organized for your team’s workflow. This can save dozens of hours compared to manual coding with classic research tools or LLMs.
There’s a wide ecosystem of research tools aimed at qualitative survey analysis. For example, NVivo and MAXQDA deliver AI-powered sentiment analysis and thematic clustering, while ATLAS.ti and Delve help with mixed-methods analysis.[1] But if speed and actionability are your priorities, and you want one integrated workspace, an AI survey solution like Specific is hard to beat.
Useful prompts that you can use for event attendee survey response analysis
AI is only as good as the instructions you give it. When analyzing your event attendee survey about venue suitability, use these tested prompts to get the best results.
Prompt for core ideas: Want a condensed version of your attendees’ biggest talking points? Use this for high-quality themes (works in ChatGPT or 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
AI always works better if you provide context. Add details about the event, your goals, or important aspects you care about. For example:
Here are responses from an event attendee survey about venue suitability for our annual tech conference. Our main interest is on accessibility, location, and comfort. Highlight the most important issues attendees faced, and note if responses differ between first-time and returning attendees.
Prompt for deeper dives: After seeing key ideas, ask the AI: “Tell me more about accessibility concerns (core idea).” This can help unpack what’s driving the most cited themes.
Prompt for specific topic: If you want to check if anyone discussed, say, location or parking, just ask: “Did anyone talk about parking?” You’ll get a focused summary. Add “Include quotes” to get actual examples from attendees.
Prompt for personas: If you want to segment your audience, try: “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.”
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 Motivations & Drivers: “From the survey conversations, extract the primary motivations, desires, or reasons participants express for their behaviors or choices. Group similar motivations together and provide supporting evidence from the data.”
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 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 Unmet Needs & Opportunities: “Examine the survey responses to uncover any unmet needs, gaps, or opportunities for improvement as highlighted by respondents.”
For more inspiration, see our recommended questions for an event attendee survey about venue suitability or experiment with our AI survey generator preset for event attendees.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
Specific was built with research rigor in mind, so analysis isn’t one-size-fits-all—it adapts to your survey design:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): You get a full summary of the main response plus summaries for all follow-up answers tied to that question.
Choices with follow-ups: Each answer choice (say, “location” or “comfort”) gets its own summary of the related follow-up responses. This makes it simple to spot where certain frustrations or suggestions cluster, based on what attendees selected.
NPS questions: Attendees are grouped as detractors, passives, or promoters. Each group has a separate summary based on their open-text follow-up answers, making it easy to see what drives loyalty or disappointment in each segment.
You can replicate all of this using ChatGPT—it just takes more effort to copy, filter, and summarize manually. Specific packages this into a single workflow for survey creators, so you don't miss anything important. For a step-by-step guide to building tailored event surveys, check out our how-to article on survey creation for this use case.
Dealing with AI context limits in survey analysis
Every AI model has a context window limit—a maximum size for input text. Large event surveys or in-depth interviews can easily exceed this, making it tough to analyze everything at once. Here’s how to handle it:
Filtering: Apply filters before AI analysis. Only include event attendee conversations that touch on the questions or answers you care about. This keeps the data tight, so more unique responses fit in the AI’s context window.
Cropping: Limit analysis to specific questions (for instance, just venue feedback, not registration comments or demographics). This technique lets you focus the AI’s processing power on only the essential responses, so you can probe deeper into venue suitability themes.
Specific does both filtering and cropping out-of-the-box, but these methods can also be adapted to other tools if you’re comfortable wrangling data manually. For a deeper understanding of how AI handles follow-up logic, see our breakdown on automatic AI follow-ups.
Collaborative features for analyzing event attendee survey responses
It’s rare that one person owns the entire insights process for venue suitability surveys. I hear from teams all the time—someone in ops is interested in logistics feedback, while marketing wants to know about attendee experience. Collaboration can get messy if you’re not careful.
Analyze collaboratively through chat. In Specific, you don’t need email chains or random Slack messages—just chat with the AI directly in the platform about the response data. It’s fast, interactive, and your teammates can see the exact chats you’ve started.
Multiple simultaneous chats: You or your colleagues can spin up several separate chats, each filtered or focused differently (“Let’s see what people said about parking” vs. “What did promoters love most?”). Each chat shows who started it, making it super clear whose perspective is driving the initial conversation.
Transparency in collaboration: Every AI-chat conversation displays the sender’s avatar. This helps with transparency and accountability, so when you circle back, you know where an insight or summary came from—no more confusion about source or intent.
Tailored control and sharing: Share links to saved chats with anyone on your research or event planning team. Insights aren’t siloed or lost in someone’s inbox. And if you want to edit or add new questions to a survey, you can do this seamlessly by chatting with the AI survey editor (get started with the AI survey editor).
Want to build your own survey for this scenario? Use our AI survey builder and generator to get started from scratch in minutes.
Create your event attendee survey about venue suitability now
Start capturing richer, more actionable feedback from your event audience—and instantly surface insights you can act on, thanks to smarter AI-powered analysis, tailored follow-ups, and hassle-free reporting.