This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from a Webinar Attendee survey about Discussion Topics. If you want to turn feedback into actionable insights, I’ll walk you through proven strategies that really work.
Choose the right tools for analyzing survey responses
Your approach and tools depend a lot on the form and structure of your survey data.
Quantitative data: If you’ve collected things like ratings, multiple choice counts, or NPS scores, tools like Google Sheets or Excel are often your best friends. These spreadsheets tally up responses, calculate percentages, and produce simple visuals without fuss. You can quickly spot that, for example, 92% of attendees prefer live Q&A sessions—a stat that reveals key preferences at a glance [1].
Qualitative data: When you move into open-ended or follow-up questions—basically, answers where people type whatever they want—manual review goes out the window. There’s just too much text to realistically read and categorize by hand. AI-powered survey tools, especially those built on GPT technology, can summarize free-text responses, spot recurring themes among attendees, and identify the hotspots that need your attention [3].
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
You can export your qualitative survey data and paste it into ChatGPT (or other generative AI tools). From there, you chat back and forth about results—asking it to summarize, detect trends, or list pain points.
That’s definitely workable, but not very convenient. Copy-pasting big data sets often bumps up against context limits (AI’s memory per session), and it’s easy to lose track of different segments. You’ll miss out on advanced survey features, like linking follow-ups to specific answers, and you spend a lot of time just wrangling the data into the right shape.
All-in-one tool like Specific
There are tools purpose-built for survey analysis using AI—one example is Specific. These all-in-one solutions let you create conversational surveys and automatically analyze the results.
Survey collection and followups: When collecting data, the AI asks smart follow-up questions, digging deeper into topics attendees care about. This makes responses richer and much more actionable (here’s more about AI-powered followup questions).
Automatic qualitative analysis: As soon as responses come in, Specific uses AI to instantly summarize what participants said, find key patterns, and map out actionable insights. It’s far beyond just word clouds—think clear lists of the most mentioned topics or detailed breakdowns by audience segments. You don’t need to set up formulas or manually dig for trends.
Chat conversationally with your data: You can ask follow-up questions just like you would in ChatGPT. But, it’s fully context-aware and built for survey analysis, with features for setting filters, managing question context, and collaborating with teammates. If you want to see how easy it is to get started, check out the Webinar Attendee survey generator for discussion topics.
Useful prompts that you can use for analyzing Webinar Attendee survey data on discussion topics
Whether you’re using ChatGPT or an AI tool like Specific, the right prompts can turn messy text into crisp, usable findings. Here are some of the most effective prompts I’ve used for analyzing Webinar Attendee survey responses:
Prompt for core ideas: This is the workhorse for identifying the main themes in your data. It works beautifully even in very large surveys. Just drop in your data and use:
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: Always give AI context. The more you tell the AI about your survey’s goals, the questions you want answered, or the context for your audience, the better its results will be. Here’s how you can increase effectiveness:
You are analyzing responses from a survey of webinar attendees, asking about their preferred discussion topics for future sessions. My goal is to make the content more engaging and relevant. Please extract trends, keep the language concise, and identify the most important themes that keep coming up.
Once you know the key themes, you can dig deeper:
Prompt to expand: Ask: "Tell me more about XYZ (core idea)". This is perfect for zooming in on a single topic and getting related participant quotes or finer-grained themes.
Prompt for specific topics: If you have an idea you want validated, use: "Did anyone talk about XYZ?" Try adding “Include quotes” for richer context.
Prompt for personas: Get a sense of your attendees by asking, "Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed."
Prompt for pain points and challenges: Spot hurdles quickly by saying, "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: If you want to know what keeps your attendees coming back, try, "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: To get a read on the overall vibe, ask, "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: When you’re looking for improvement, use, "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: To surface new opportunities, say, "Examine the survey responses to uncover any unmet needs, gaps, or opportunities for improvement as highlighted by respondents."
Check out the full list of best questions for Webinar Attendee discussion surveys for more inspiration.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
The value of AI analysis becomes clear when it’s tailored to each question type in your survey:
Open-ended questions (with/without follow-ups): Specific summarizes all free-text responses, including those to related follow-up questions. You get a concise digest of what attendees are saying, why they care, and the language they use.
Choices with follow-ups: Each selected option (like “Preferred length: 45 minutes”) receives its own themed summary of what people who chose that answer said in their follow-up.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): Feedback is grouped by NPS category—detractors, passives, promoters. Each group gets a targeted summary with the unique reasons and details expressed by its members.
You can do something similar using ChatGPT prompts, but it takes a lot more tedious cutting, pasting, and segmenting on your part. With an all-in-one tool, these summaries and breakdowns are automatic and made for action.
Learn more about this in the guide on creating webinar attendee surveys for discussion topics.
Handling context size limits in AI survey analysis
Anyone who’s tried to paste too many survey results into an AI tool knows—there’s a hard limit to how much data GPT models can process at once. When your Discussion Topics survey gets a big turnout, that’s a real constraint. Specific tackles this head-on, but you can use similar logic with other tools as well.
Filtering: You can filter which conversations are included in your analysis. For example, only look at responses where users replied to certain questions or made particular choices. This narrows the dataset so you can dive deep into just the segments you care about most.
Cropping questions for AI analysis: Instead of sending the entire conversation, select only specific questions to be included in the AI context. This keeps your data inside AI’s memory buffer and means you’re always analyzing what’s most relevant.
With these two approaches—filtering and cropping—you can keep your analysis focused and scalable, even for large webinars. Advanced AI survey platforms like Specific build these filters right into the workflow for you. Discover more tools and techniques in the AI survey editor.
Collaborative features for analyzing Webinar Attendee survey responses
Collaboration is usually one of the hardest parts of analyzing survey responses, especially when a team of organizers wants to act on attendee feedback about discussion topics together.
Seamless teamwork: In Specific, you don’t have to export endless spreadsheets or rework dashboards. Just chat with the AI about your results, and share those chats with teammates.
Multiple chats, multiple perspectives: Have more than one idea about what matters? Start multiple chat threads for each angle. Every chat can carry its own data filters—like focusing on those who prefer shorter sessions (44% of attendees think 45 minutes is enough [2]) or those who value interactivity (92% love live Q&A [1]). Each chat is clearly labeled with who created it for transparency.
Effortless attribution: When collaborating, each AI chat message shows who’s contributing (thanks to visible avatars). It’s instantly clear who asked each question or shaped the insights—making it perfect for team-based review and rapid iteration.
For more on this collaborative experience, check out chat-based survey analysis in Specific.
Create your Webinar Attendee survey about Discussion Topics now
Get started on your own discussion topics survey in minutes—leverage AI, smart follow-ups, and instant analysis to improve webinars with every round of feedback.