Event Data Measurement and ROI
RainFocus AI Survey Sentiment Analysis: Speedy Survey Support
19 May 2025 | Jessica F. Lillian | 4 minutes
After your event ends, survey data provides a wealth of valuable information. Organizations can get a jumpstart on their planning for future events by getting answers to the biggest questions: What did your attendees think of the event? Did they like Session A or Session B better? Which networking approaches were most effective? Should you pick a new venue for next year’s conference?
In particular, survey questions that allow open-text responses can surface deep, specific information from attendees that fuels ongoing event improvements and innovation. But of course, first you have to wade through all that text — something that many of our clients said took them way too long. Although manual analysis could work for small events, it couldn’t scale for enterprise events that might involve processing thousands of open-text survey responses.
Analyzing open-text survey responses is now much, much easier with RainFocus AI Survey Sentiment Analysis, introduced late last year.
The tool was developed to address the cumbersome manual analysis needed for open-text survey data. The burden often meant clients would just skip those types of questions, explains Adam Blaylock, product marketing manager at RainFocus.
“They had to serve another question type instead, such as multiple choices or assigning a rating,” he says. “Many were relegated to more niche or narrowly scoped surveys, just because they needed to avoid the hassle of dealing with text-based questions. This affected the availability and usability of qualitative input.”
Now, AI-powered analysis gives instantaneous scoring and sorting so that teams can zero in on what matters.
“Being able to immediately sort feedback into categories — positive, negative, neutral, and invalid — can be especially useful when teams are using surveys as part of gamification,” Blaylock says. “Some attendees will tear through the survey questions just for the points without providing any real information, which makes their input useless.”
Instant survey data for every stakeholder
To get all the vital information from attendee surveys to everyone faster, AI Survey Sentiment Analysis generates convenient executive summaries. There’s no need to wait for the survey to close: Teams can run sentiment analysis manually whenever they’d like and easily export the results for interim reports or decision-making for on-the-fly changes.
Analysis can also occur automatically after the survey ends. For earlier surveys, teams can even retroactively run the analysis to glean new information.
Given the strong guardrails needed to always protect user data — especially for events — RainFocus’ product team took steps to ensure the addition of generative AI maintained full digital safety and privacy for both clients and their event attendees.
“Most importantly, we have a closed, private instance of our AI cloud model,” Blaylock notes. “Inputs and other content are never used to train the model. They are also not shared with others, and data is segmented by client for full competitive protection. Of course, all features and tools are fully vetted by our security team.”
Looking ahead
Like many RainFocus features, AI Survey Sentiment Analysis can be flexibly applied to address each event team’s unique challenges. As clients move through their event calendar, they’ll undoubtedly discover new applications.
“One use case is applying filters to reduce legwork,” Blaylock says. “For example, if you wanted to know more about pain points that attendees experienced during check-in, you could filter feedback to show only negative comments and then zero in on the check-in topic without having to sift through as much.”
By now, tasks like analyzing text-based responses and answering questions based on data represent solidly established AI use cases. RainFocus’ product teams have already built on this foundational work to develop more nuanced, advanced uses of the technologies.
Most importantly, every feature will be aligned with client needs and the industry’s most pressing challenges.
“There’s a lot that AI can do, but you don’t want to do everything with AI just because you can,” Blaylock says. “Instead, we want to specifically solve problems that we know event managers face.”