You've been preparing for this event for months. The venue is ready, your very respected speaker has arrived early, and you have every painstaking detail in place. The doors open, the attendees flood in, you talk to some people you recognize from past events and they seem pleased. Attendance is definitely up from last year. So was your event a success?
The sad truth is people will give you great feedback about your event while it's happening, whether they liked it or not (they want to be nice!), and while high attendance means you did a better job at marketing the event, it doesn't necessarily mean the event itself was a hit.
High attendance and kind anecdotes are not surefire ways to measure event success. If your boss asks you to prove that your event spend was worth it, how do you respond?
This challenge of "proving" event success is faced by every event professional or meeting planner, whether they host a small internal company sales kickoff or a mega-event with 100,000 attendees.
There are, in fact, ways to "measure" event success, but it's important to put the right tools for your event in place from the start. While strategies may vary from event to event, here are some reliable tactics that have helped us measure and demonstrate event effectiveness.
1. Identify your goals in advance
Before your event begins, identify your goals. This part isn't so hard. Education, revenue, brand visibility, engagement level for attendees; these are all potential event goals that you might be measuring. Additionally, many planners say event success is determined by "softer" parameters like networking, content retention, and overall experience. While identifying these goals is fairly straightforward, measuring them -- especially "soft" goals -- can pose more of a challenge.
2. Put measurement tools in place
Being an event app company, we love solving problems with technology. Eventbrite or Marketo, for example, are effective for managing and promoting registration (we've used both). Beacons (location-based tools) are fantastic for delivering timely, localized messages. Did the coffee bars deliver? Place beacons at every bar and when people come to get a cup of joe, hit them with a survey and you will know the answer.
We use the same mobile event app our clients use to measure attendee sentiment, deploy live polling, and launch session-based surveys. Was that keynote speaker worth the price tag? If you have an audience-response system in place, you can find out. On the DoubleDutch platform, you can also use other metrics (in addition to overt response to polls and surveys) to ascertain session popularity. Factors like the number of bookmarks, mentions, views, or session ratings are all great complements to the direct feedback. For the softer metrics like attendee happiness, we use the app activity feed to create community, get hashtags trending, and share viral photos.
3. Listen to what the data means
As you gather all of this great information, it's important to listen to your data and make changes as necessary. For example, there is a bottleneck of people around the session because people didn't realize there was another door. Or a speaker cancelled last minute. With the right event instrumentation, you should have a two-way communication tool that allows you to save the day immediately and react with agility.
Send a push notification to everyone's phones to let them know where the other doors are located. Update the digital agenda immediately, and then pin a message to the top of their app feeds alerting them of the scheduling change. While there are certain lessons that can only be learned for next time around, there are many small (but important) things that can be impacted during the event. This ability to shape the outcome of your event -- as it happens -- is what makes the difference between a good and great event.
With the right tools in place, event professionals can capture and measure the right data to help determine whether an event was successful. This provides you with unprecedented and valuable lessons about your event performance. It also helps you answer that elusive question, "How did the event go?" and "Is it worth doing again?"
Jennifer Hawkins is the marketing director at DoubleDutch, a leading provider of mobile event apps. Prior to DoubleDutch, she worked at a technology incubator founded and operated by a team of Silicon Valley investors. She holds a marketing degree from Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and sits on the Board of Directors at Mission Graduates, a nonprofit that helps at-risk youth prepare for college. Follow her @jenhawkn.
This article appears in the May 2015 issue of Successful Meetings.