This article will guide you on how to create a survey for conference participants about speaker effectiveness. With Specific, we can help you generate a tailored survey in seconds, saving valuable time while ensuring your questions capture meaningful feedback.
Steps to create a survey for conference participants about speaker effectiveness
If you want to save time, just click this link to generate a survey with Specific.
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
Honestly, you don’t even need to read further—AI will create your survey with built-in expert knowledge, and it will even ask respondents relevant follow-up questions to uncover deeper insights. But if you’re curious how and why this works, let's keep going.
Why surveys on speaker effectiveness matter for conference participants
The importance of evaluating presentations can’t be overstated—if you're not running these surveys, you’re missing out on essential insights that drive event improvement and attendee satisfaction. For instance, 75% of attendees assess conferences based on speaker quality and relevance to their field—so when you capture feedback about speaker effectiveness, you’re tapping into the biggest measure of your event’s success [1].
If you skip these surveys, you risk repeating mistakes or missing opportunities to elevate your conference experience.
Well-designed feedback surveys make attendees feel heard, which increases their engagement and likelihood to return for future events.
Most importantly, you gain actionable data to refine your content, support your speakers, and adapt to the evolving expectations of your audience.
But not all surveys are created equal—let’s talk about what makes a good one.
What makes a good conference survey on speaker effectiveness
To get high response rates and useful data, you need clarity and a natural conversational flow. Good surveys use:
Clear, unbiased questions that remove confusion or leading language
A conversational tone—when respondents feel like they’re chatting, they're much more likely to be open and honest.
Remember, the quality—and quantity—of your responses are the best validation of your survey’s effectiveness. You want lots of answers, but also answers that actually illuminate what worked and what didn’t.
Bad Practice | Good Practice |
|---|---|
Leading question: "Don’t you agree this talk was fascinating?" | Neutral question: "How would you rate the speaker’s engagement?" |
Jargon: "Was the session KPI-centric?" | Simple language: "Did the speaker’s message feel clear and relatable?" |
Specific’s AI survey builder hits these marks by default, so you don’t have to overthink the details. For more inspiration, check out our article on best questions for conference participant surveys about speaker effectiveness.
Question types and practical examples for conference participant surveys
Striking the right balance in your survey question types helps you maximize both the detail and the completeness of your insights. Here’s how we like to approach it:
Open-ended questions are crucial when you want conference participants to freely share their thoughts, highlight specific strengths, or suggest areas for improvement. They’re especially valuable after a high-impact session, or whenever standardized answers just won’t cut it. Some example questions:
What was the most valuable takeaway from the speaker’s presentation?
If you could change one thing about this session, what would it be?
Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect for structured results—great for quantifying opinions or quickly spotting trends across large groups. For example:
How would you rate the speaker’s effectiveness?
Excellent
Good
Neutral
Poor
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question enables you to measure outright advocacy for a session or speaker, offering a broad view of enthusiasm and potential for word-of-mouth. This question fits well after core content when you want a single metric to benchmark performance. You can also generate an NPS survey for speaker effectiveness instantly. A typical NPS question:
How likely are you to recommend this speaker’s session to other conference participants on a scale from 0 to 10?
Followup questions to uncover "the why" are your not-so-secret weapon. Sometimes, initial responses are vague or incomplete. When you ask a targeted followup, you dig into their real motivations. For instance:
What made you rate the speaker as ‘excellent’?
Can you share more about which part of the talk felt unclear?
If you want to explore more question types, examples, and how to nail your survey’s tone, dive into our best questions for conference participant surveys article.
What is a conversational survey (and why do it with AI)?
Conversational surveys feel like a real back-and-forth—they ask questions, respond to answers, and adapt their tone to the flow. Traditional survey forms, on the other hand, are rigid checklists. Here’s how it breaks down:
Manual Survey | AI-Generated Survey |
|---|---|
Static questions | Dynamically adapts |
Manual review & analysis | AI auto-analyzes and summarizes insights |
Often ignored on mobile | Feels like a chat—engaging & mobile-friendly |
Why use AI for conference participant surveys? We believe that AI-powered survey generation is transformative: it saves time, makes survey building fun, and delivers higher-quality data. If you want, you can always start a survey from scratch. With AI, your survey adapts on the fly, reaching more people on any device and capturing context that old-school forms simply miss. The difference is especially dramatic in response rates—mobile-friendly, conversational surveys see up to 30% more feedback compared to traditional forms [2].
Specific takes this even further, offering a seamless user experience. Our conversational surveys remove barriers—respondents answer as if they’re chatting, and we make sure feedback loops are natural and effortless. If you’re curious about building your first survey end-to-end, check out how to create a survey from scratch using AI.
The power of follow-up questions
Let’s be honest: initial answers often leave you wanting more detail. That’s where follow-up questions change the game, and Specific’s automatic AI follow-up feature really shines.
AI-driven followup questions ask for clarification or elaboration in real time, adapting to the respondent’s previous answers—just like a human expert would do in a live interview. This saves teams the headache of chasing down respondents after the fact (think: “Can you explain your answer?” emails—nobody wants those).
Here’s what happens if you skip followups:
Conference Participant: The talk was okay.
AI follow-up: Can you share what you liked about the talk, or what could have made it more engaging for you?
See the difference? That second question draws out specifics—unlocking real value in your data.
How many followups to ask? We recommend 2-3 targeted followups in most cases, but it’s crucial to allow respondents to skip ahead once their point is made. Specific lets you customize this for every survey.
This makes it a conversational survey: Instead of gathering shallow data, you’re building a context-rich dialogue—respondents feel heard, and you get more meaningful feedback.
Easy analysis of unstructured data: Thanks to AI, analyzing free-text responses is easy and actionable—see our guide on how to analyze responses from your survey with AI.
Automated followups are still a new concept! Try building a survey with this feature and experience the clarity and completeness for yourself.
See this speaker effectiveness survey example now
Try building your own conference participant survey about speaker effectiveness and see how conversational AI surveys can capture richer, more actionable insights—fast, easy, and tailored to your audience.