This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from an online event attendee survey about topics of interest. If you want actionable insights from your data, understanding the right approach and tools is critical.
Choosing the right tools for survey response analysis
How you analyze your survey data depends a lot on the structure and the type of responses you collected. Let’s break down the approaches:
Quantitative data: For data like “How many people picked each option?” you can quickly run counts and summaries using tools like Excel or Google Sheets. These answers are structured and easy to tally.
Qualitative data: For open-ended survey answers or longer responses to follow-up questions, reading each reply is almost impossible at scale. Here, AI-powered tools become critical—they help reveal hidden themes and patterns that would be tedious (or impossible) to spot manually.
When dealing with qualitative responses, there are two main approaches for tooling:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
If you export your survey responses, you can paste them directly into ChatGPT or similar AI platforms and chat about your data. This approach can work for small to medium datasets. However, I find managing the data this way to be a bit inconvenient, especially if you want to segment, filter, or compare answers across different groups or questions. You’ll often hit context length limits, and it’s easy to lose track of your analysis.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Specific is an end-to-end solution built for survey creation and AI-powered response analysis. It not only collects conversational survey data but also asks real-time follow-up questions, boosting the quality and depth of each response. For analysis, Specific instantly summarizes results, spots key themes, and highlights actionable insights—no spreadsheets or jumping between platforms.
What’s especially helpful: you can chat directly with the AI about your results, just like with ChatGPT, but with extra tools for managing context, filtering, and team collaboration. You can see this in action here: AI survey response analysis.
AI analysis tools like NVivo, MAXQDA, Delve, Canvs AI, and Quirkos also automate tasks like theme identification and sentiment analysis, helping you work faster and with more consistency. These solutions leverage AI and NLP to streamline the qualitative analysis process—making it possible to interpret open-ended survey responses in real time and with higher quality. [1][2]
Useful prompts that you can use for analyzing online event attendee survey responses about topics of interest
Let’s talk about practical prompts you can send to ChatGPT, Specific, or any AI analysis tool to unlock insights from your online event attendee survey. Using the right questions will vastly improve your results—and using a flexible AI survey chat interface makes it even easier.
Prompt for core ideas: This universal prompt highlights the main themes echoed by your attendees. Use it when you want the clearest summary of what matters most, whether you’re in Specific or another AI chat tool:
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
Tip: AI always works better with more context. For instance, tell your AI:
I ran a survey with 200 online event attendees to learn about their preferred topics for future webinars and their main motivations for attending. Please extract the main topics of interest and explain briefly why they matter.
Once you’ve identified the main themes, dig deeper by asking:
Tell me more about XYZ (core idea).
Prompt for specific topic: To see if a certain subject was mentioned (for example, “AI in event marketing”), ask:
Did anyone talk about AI in event marketing?
Include quotes.
Prompt for personas: Find out what types of attendees you have with:
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:
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.
By using targeted prompts, you will extract richer, more nuanced findings than just reading through each response. For more inspiration on designing your questions (and getting even better data to analyze), check out the best questions for online event attendee survey about topics of interest.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data based on question type
I see that qualitative data is tricky because it comes in so many forms. Here’s how Specific organizes and summarizes your results based on the structure of your questions:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): You get a summary for all responses, including any answers to follow-up questions linked to the same topic.
Choices with follow-ups: Each choice gets its own summary of all follow-up responses attached to that option. This makes it easy to compare motivations or feedback for each topic attendees selected.
NPS survey: Each group (detractors, passives, and promoters) has a separate summary section, so you’ll see exactly how different attendees explained their score choices and what might improve their experience.
You can actually do a similar breakdown with ChatGPT or another GPT tool. The process just takes more manual sorting and prompt management, which is why I favor integrated tools like Specific for larger datasets. You can learn more about optimizing question structures in this guide to creating an online event attendee survey about topics of interest.
How to tackle AI context limits in survey analysis
Context limits are real—AI tools can only process a certain amount of data (“context”) at a time. If your survey has too many responses to fit, you need to break things down. Specific offers these workarounds by default, but you can do them in other tools too:
Filtering: Narrow the conversation set—analyze only those who answered certain questions or selected specific options. This keeps things focused and ensures the responses you send to the AI fit into its processing window.
Cropping: Select and send only the questions (or response sections) that matter most for your current analysis. This both speeds up analysis and increases precision, as AI is looking at a smaller, more relevant subset at once.
Good platforms make this easy and transparent, avoiding the headache of manual data filtering in Excel or Google Sheets. For more about how Specific handles conversation selection and context, take a look at AI survey response analysis.
Collaborative features for analyzing online event attendee survey responses
Collaborating on survey analysis can become a mess—whether you’re working with event organizers or a wider marketing team, it’s all too easy to get lost in spreadsheets or overlapping comment threads.
Instant, chat-based analysis: In Specific, you analyze survey data simply by chatting with AI. It means everyone on your team can explore results without the technical barrier of spreadsheets or query builders.
Multiple, focused chats: You can create multiple chats for the same survey, each with its own question filters and audience segment. You immediately see who started the chat and the angle they’re exploring—making team efforts more transparent.
Team member visibility: Within these chats, each message is marked with the sender’s avatar, so you always know who made which observation or asked which question. This is perfect for aligning across marketing, events, and content teams—no more missed context or duplicated work.
To get started quickly, you can generate the exact survey you want with Specific's AI survey generator for online event attendee surveys about topics of interest, or explore more options for survey editing at AI survey editor. If you want to see a ready-to-go Net Promoter Score survey template, this link launches it in Specific: NPS survey for event attendees about topics of interest.
Create your online event attendee survey about topics of interest now
Design a survey that asks better questions, collects richer data, and turns attendee feedback into powerful insights—so your next event always matches what your audience truly cares about.