This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from a masterclass attendee survey about agenda preferences using AI survey analysis methods.
Choosing the right tools for analysis
Before diving in, I always look at the shape and structure of the survey response data—my approach and tooling depend on this. Here’s how I break it down:
Quantitative data: When responses are things like how many people chose a certain session or ranked an option, I find Excel or Google Sheets does the job quickly. Count, chart, summarize—done.
Qualitative data: When I’m dealing with open-ended responses—why attendees picked certain topics, what new ideas they want, frustrations with previous agendas—manual reading just won’t cut it, especially for large surveys. You’ll need AI-driven tools to extract those deep insights out of the noise.
There are two main approaches for tooling when it comes to qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Copy–paste into ChatGPT: You can export your masterclass attendee responses to a spreadsheet or text document, then paste the data into ChatGPT or similar models for analysis. This gives you a flexible way to chat with your data and get quick insights—summaries, idea extraction, sentiment, etc.
Downsides: This approach isn’t ideal for larger surveys. Handling long text, structuring the data, and keeping context straight can get clunky. You’ll spend time prepping, chunking, and tracking follow-up questions.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built for survey insights: Specific brings both collection and AI analysis to one place. While running your survey, it captures deeper attendee feedback by asking follow-up questions in real time. This means you get richer context and higher-quality data from each participant. Read more on the automatic AI follow-up questions feature.
AI-powered summarization and chat: As soon as responses come in, Specific’s AI analyzes everything. It summarizes comments, finds key themes, and shows you actionable insights—so you skip the spreadsheet hassle. You can chat directly with the AI about the results, just like in ChatGPT, but with features designed for survey data. Curious? Check how it works on AI survey response analysis.
Best of both worlds: You get the convenience of built-in filtering, custom chat sessions with data, and control over what to send to AI—all purpose-built for survey analysis.
Market context: There are other AI-powered tools worth noting, like NVivo, MAXQDA, and Insight7, each offering automatic coding and sentiment analysis for qualitative data. Using AI speeds up qualitative analysis by as much as 70%, and sentiment tasks can now achieve around 90% accuracy, which is a big leap over manual crunching. [1][2][3]
Related: If you’re designing a new survey, check out this masterclass agenda preferences survey generator for quick setup.
Useful prompts that you can use for masterclass attendee agenda preferences analysis
Having the right prompt turns a raw data dump into lightbulb moments. These are my go-tos:
Prompt for core ideas: For identifying the big topics (what’s trending, what stands out). This is also built into Specific, but works in generic models 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
Add context for better AI results: The more you tell the AI about your survey, your goals, or the situation, the more relevant its analysis gets. Here’s an example:
You are analyzing open-ended responses from a masterclass attendee survey about agenda preferences. My main goal is to identify which session topics are most desired and if any logistics issues stand out. Please summarize the core ideas as above.
Once you’ve got core ideas, dive deeper into any topic with a prompt like: “Tell me more about XYZ (core idea)”.
Prompt for specific topic: Quickly validate if a particular idea or concern surfaced. Try:
Did anyone talk about breakout sessions? Include quotes.
Some other prompts I recommend for a survey like this:
Prompt for personas: Understand distinct attendee types and their goals:
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: Spot what attendees wish was better:
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: Gather all actionable attendee feedback:
Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.
If you want more, I’ve written up a guide to the best questions for a masterclass agenda preferences survey.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
Specific takes the structure of your survey into account and summarizes responses by question type. Here’s how I use it for different scenarios:
Open-ended questions with or without follow-ups: Specific generates a summary for all responses and any follow-ups related to the question. I get a crystal-clear view of overall sentiment and standout points.
Choices with follow-ups: Each option gets its own summary—so I can quickly see why people picked certain agenda topics, or if something stood out among a group.
NPS questions: Responses are grouped and summarized for detractors, passives, and promoters. Each group’s follow-ups (e.g., “what could improve your experience?”) are distilled separately.
You can manually do similar slicing with ChatGPT by prepping your data per question and pasting it chunk by chunk—but it’s more labor-intensive.
For more on creating great surveys, check this step-by-step article on how to create masterclass attendee agenda preference surveys.
Dealing with AI context limit challenges
One big hurdle in AI analysis: large surveys don’t fit into the model’s context window (the limit on how much data AI can “see” at one time). Here’s how I deal with this:
Filtering responses: I segment the data—maybe by filtering out only those who answered a specific agenda question, or those with particularly detailed comments. This cuts down the data pool sent to the AI for each analysis.
Cropping questions for AI: Instead of sending complete multi-question conversations, I select only the most relevant questions to include in the AI context. This lets me analyze more responses, without overloading the AI.
Specific bakes both of these options in, so I don’t have to do any fiddly selection or heavy lifting before running analysis.
Collaborative features for analyzing masterclass attendee survey responses
One common pain point with masterclass attendee agenda preference surveys is collaborative analysis—multiple team members want in on the insights, ask their own follow-up questions, or segment responses differently.
Chat-driven collaboration: In Specific, I analyze survey data just by chatting with AI—no need for clunky exports or shared spreadsheets.
Multiple parallel chats: Each chat has its own filters, and it’s easy to see who started which thread. Colleagues can focus separate analyses on pain points, logistics, or session ideas—no stepping on toes (or duplicating work).
Easy attribution: When collaborating, every message in AI chat shows the sender’s avatar. This keeps conversations organized, transparent, and friendly. If you want to try building a survey collaboratively, the AI survey editor is set up for this workflow.
If you want a ready-to-go survey, here’s a NPS survey builder preset for masterclass attendees.
Create your masterclass attendee survey about agenda preferences now
Start uncovering real attendee needs and make your next masterclass agenda the most relevant yet—Specific streamlines analysis, enhances quality, and gets your team collaborating effectively from the very first response.