What 80-90% Event Survey Response Rates Actually Look Like in Practice

A conversation between Mark Brewster, CEO of Explori, and Nicola Kastner, CEO of ELX

There is a widespread assumption in the events industry that survey response rates are in structural decline. The assumption has become so accepted that many event organisers treat a 30 or 40% response rate as the ceiling, a reasonable result given the conditions.

Nicola Kastner does not accept that ceiling.

As CEO of ELX, an invite-only community for heads of events at large organisations, Nicola achieves post-event survey response rates consistently in the eighties and nineties. A bad result, by her definition, is anything below 75%. That happened once.

When Explori's CEO, Mark Brewster, spoke with Nicola about how she does it, what emerged was not a set of technical workarounds or incentive schemes. It was a philosophy about what surveys are for and who they are designed to serve.

You can watch the full conversation or read the key takeaways below.

The events industry is not facing a survey problem. It is facing a trust problem.

Attendees complete surveys when they believe the feedback will be used. When they have been asked the same questions for three consecutive years and seen nothing change, they stop answering. Not because they are too senior, too busy or too cynical, but because the implicit contract has been broken.

Nicola's approach starts from a different premise. Before her attendees arrive at an event, they already understand that their feedback drives the design of the next one. By the time the survey reaches their inbox, completing it is not a favour to the organiser. It is an investment in their own experience.

The ELX feedback methodology

The process Nicola describes is consistent across every event.

At the start of every event, she opens with a single slide containing three words: value for time. She explains to attendees that this is her most important metric, that the survey is how she measures it, and that the data shapes every decision about what happens next.

Throughout the event, she and her emcee reinforce the message at every relevant moment. When a session format has changed, they say so and they say why. When a new element has been added, they attribute it explicitly to what members said the year before. The feedback loop is visible and specific.

At the close of the event, she reminds attendees that the survey is live. The timing is deliberate. The email deploys as attendees are leaving, so the experience is immediate when they open it on the journey home.

Post-event, she uses unique survey links per attendee. This allows her to follow up individually with those who have not yet responded. It also allows her to combine survey data with registration data and segment results by persona, seniority and any other variable that matters to ELX.

None of this involves incentives. No vouchers, no charitable donations, no prize draws. The incentive, as Nicola puts it, is that better feedback produces better events. For an audience of senior event professionals who have chosen to give ELX a significant portion of their annual event calendar, that is sufficient.

The myth of the time-poor senior respondent

One of the most persistent explanations for low response rates is that senior audiences do not complete surveys. Nicola's ELX data contradicts this directly.

ELX members are SVPs, senior managers and heads of events at large corporations. They are running their own event portfolios while attending ELX events. They are time-poor by any reasonable measure. They complete the surveys at rates above 80%.

Nicola's explanation is direct: people give feedback when the feedback benefits them. Seniority is not a barrier to response. Seniority combined with a belief that the survey is performative rather than purposeful is what suppresses response rates.

The same principle, in Nicola's view, holds at CEO-level conferences. When the audience trusts that their feedback matters, response rates remain high regardless of seniority.

Events are products. Surveys are product development.

The most important shift in Nicola's framing is this: she treats her events as products and the survey as the primary mechanism for continuous improvement.

This is not a metaphor. It is an operational reality. If attendees report a friction point in aggregate, there is a responsibility to address it before the next event. If you ask and do not act, you erode exactly the trust that makes high response rates possible.

This perspective also addresses whether AI, behavioural data or app-based feedback could replace post-event surveys. Nicola's view is that they cannot, not because surveys are technically superior to other data sources, but because they capture something the others cannot: the considered, voluntary response of someone who has chosen to give you their honest assessment.

Registration data is obligatory. App interaction data is passive. Survey responses are opt-in and motivated. When someone chooses to complete a survey, there is a strong argument that they are more likely to answer honestly than when they are populating a required form.

The metrics that matter at ELX

When asked to identify the two or three metrics she considers foundational, Nicola was direct.

Value for time is her primary metric. For an invite-only community built on the premise that membership is earned and retained through genuine value exchange, it is the most honest measure of whether an event is delivering on its purpose.

NPS is her second metric, though she is openly critical of how it is structured and scored. The standard NPS framework treats an eight out of ten as a near-failure, a scoring convention that does not reflect how most attendees experience giving that score.

Content scores and cross-event comparison complete her core measurement set. The latter, how this event compares to others the attendee has attended during the year, is a competitive indicator that most event measurement frameworks do not include. For Nicola, it is a signal she cannot afford to miss.

On benchmarking specifically: she is explicit that access to cross-industry benchmarks changed how she interprets her own data. Without a reference point, strong scores raise questions rather than resolve them. With benchmarks, a score becomes meaningful rather than merely numerical.

What declining response rates are actually telling you

Declining response rates are, in most cases, a symptom of a broken feedback loop, not a technology problem, not an audience problem and not an inevitable trend.

In Nicola's experience, the event organisers who maintain response rates above 70% consistently share one characteristic: their attendees know, from direct experience, that completing the survey shapes what happens next. That belief is built and maintained across every communication touchpoint, not just the survey invitation.

The corrective action is not a new distribution channel, a shorter survey or a gift card. It is a sustained and visible commitment to closing the loop: telling people what changed, why it changed and what is still being worked on. Done consistently, that converts survey completion from a favour into an act of self-interest for the attendee.

That is the standard ELX has set. It is replicable. It starts with the decision to treat measurement as a discipline rather than an afterthought.

Frequently asked questions

How do you get senior executives to complete post-event surveys?

The short answer is that seniority is not the variable that determines whether someone completes a survey. Trust is. Senior executives complete surveys at high rates when they have direct evidence that their feedback shapes what happens next. Nicola Kasner achieves response rates consistently above 80% with an audience of SVPs and heads of events at large corporations, not by shortening surveys or offering incentives, but by making the feedback loop visible at every touchpoint before, during and after each event. When attendees arrive already knowing that last year's changes were driven by what they said, completing the survey becomes an act of self-interest rather than a favour to the organiser.

Do incentives improve post-event survey response rates?

Based on Nicola's experience at ELX, no. ELX uses no incentives, i.e., no vouchers, no prize draws, no charitable donations, and consistently achieves response rates in the eighties and nineties. The mechanism that drives completion is not reward but relevance. When attendees understand that the survey directly influences the design of the next event, the value of completing it is self-evident. Incentives, by contrast, attract responses from people motivated by the reward rather than the feedback, which raises a separate question about the quality of the data you receive.

What is a good post-event survey response rate?

There is no universal benchmark, but context matters. For large-scale public events, response rates of 20 to 30% are common. For invite-only communities and high-trust professional audiences, the ceiling is considerably higher. Nicola's threshold at ELX is 75%, anything below that is considered a poor result, and it has happened once. For most corporate and association event teams, a sustained response rate above 50% is a strong indicator that the feedback loop is functioning. Below 30% consistently is a signal that attendees do not believe their responses will be used. Explori's benchmark data across thousands of events provides the reference points that allow organisers to contextualise their own response rate performance against comparable event types and audiences.

About ELX and Explori

ELX is an invite-only community for heads of events at large organisations. Its members are senior event professionals running complex, multi-event portfolios at some of the world's leading corporations. Membership is earned and retained through genuine value exchange, making it one of the most rigorously curated peer communities in the global events industry.

Explori is ELX's measurement partner. Explori provides the benchmarking infrastructure that allows Nicola and her team to contextualise their data, moving from scores that are merely numerical to scores that are meaningful. When ELX members complete a post-event survey, the results feed into a measurement framework that places ELX performance against a benchmark set drawn from thousands of comparable events.

Together, Explori and ELX have also contributed to the broader conversation on internal event measurement and the growing pressure on corporate event teams to demonstrate strategic value. That work is available here: Why Internal Events Are Under the Microscope — and How Leaders Can Prove Their Strategic Value