Follow-up market research or exit surveys are crucial to knowing where to tweak your event organization so that future projects continue to improve. Your most valuable resource for conducting this research are the event's attendees. How can you get the information they have without being invasive or annoying? Exit surveys are a common practice and can be given in-person, but chances are that at the of a long day, many if not most attendees will slip past this step or simply fill in as fast as possible, without giving much thought to the answers.

Sending out electronic surveys up to a week after the event is an easy, non-invasive way to find out what people thought about your event in detail. If you've built your contact database well, you can even create targeted surveys for different types of attendees (including exhibitors, sponsors, and speakers) and ask the most relevant questions without overloading everyone with the same form.

The DW Event Online Registration and Management System has a built-in survey tool that allows you to create detailed surveys with complex question-and-answer formats such as:

• Multiple choice
• Radio Button, Check Box, or Drop-Down lists
• Written responses
• Conditional logic (if someone responds in a certain way to one question, the following question will be presented accordingly)

These surveys will be housed online, and can also be linked to via your own event website. Later you download the answers, which can also be exported to Excel formats and analyzed.

Your DW Event CRM contact database and Email Broadcaster tools will come in handy when generating targeted lists for the different types of attendees you want to survey, and sending them emails to invite their participation in the survey. These emails can be scheduled in advance, and include statistics trackers that will allow you to:

• See how many people (and who) opened your email invitation
• See how many people clicked through to the survey

This combination of tools—the Online Surveyor, the CRM list generator, and the Email Broadcaster—gives you a simple, all-in-one solution to finding out what attendees thought of your event and how to improve on it.

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