Measuring Event Success from Pre- to Post-Event

Planning an event is like orchestrating a symphony—every note matters, from the first rehearsal to the final bow. But how do you make sure your audience has your event stuck in their head for days, weeks, and months afterwards? 
Measuring the success of your event starts well before you open the doors and ends well after your audience has gone home. Capturing metrics and insights from your event is essential to understand what went well, what could be improved, and how to plan future events more effectively.

Join us as we take a comprehensive look at how to measure event success, from initial objectives to post-event reviews. Let’s get started!

Pre-Event Preparation

The first step to measuring event success is to set clear objectives and goals for your event. What do you hope to achieve by hosting this event? Do you want to generate leads, build relationships, or raise awareness of your brand? Using SMART goals—which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—can fine-tune your objectives into actionable steps. Once you know your objectives, you can start to develop metrics to measure your success.

However, these objectives can’t exist in a vacuum. They need to be aligned with the expectations and needs of your target audience! Who is your audience? What are their interests or professional backgrounds? By understanding your audience, you can create an event that is relevant and engaging. (For instance, if you’re organizing a tech conference, knowing that your audience values hands-on workshops over lectures is crucial.)

Finally, you need to allocate resources effectively to achieve your objectives. This includes budgeting for marketing, venue, speakers, and other expenses. An effective way to handle this is by creating a detailed budget that itemizes expenses like venue hire, catering, and marketing. It is also important to track expenses so that you can ensure that your event is cost-efficient.

During the Event

While your event is underway, there are several metrics you can track to measure its success.

Attendance is the most basic metric of event success. It is important to track both the number of registered attendees and the number of actual attendees. This will help you understand the relationship between them post-event if there’s a discrepancy.

Engagement can be measured in a variety of ways. If your event is virtual or hybrid, you can use interactive tools like polls and Q&A sessions to keep track of engagement on the fly. No matter the type of event, be sure to keep an eye on social media likes, comments, and shares throughout—socials are great for getting a real-time pulse on your event. Finally, make sure you have bandwidth to gather feedback and surveys, as they’ll make another great resource to refer to later.

Quality refers to the relevance, impact, and delivery of the keynote speakers and sessions. You should aim to collect real-time feedback from attendees to gauge their satisfaction. This will give you the opportunity to make light course-corrections where needed to improve the attendee experience. Your audience will love your responsiveness! 

Networking is a huge reason why people attend events, so you should always look to measure the quality of the opportunities you’re providing. To your audience, the success of your event often hinges on the number and value of connections they make! Features like a networking lounge or a dedicated ‘meet the speakers’ area can facilitate these interactions, and surveys after the event can help you track how it went.

Post-Event Evaluation

Once the confetti has been swept away and attendees have exited the room, the real work begins! After the event, it is crucial to conduct a post-event evaluation. This is crucial to measuring event success.

Start by sending out post-event surveys shortly after the event—it’s important to reach your audience while you’re still fresh in their minds. Your surveys should be designed to elicit both numerical data (ratings) and textual data (comments). While ratings provide a quantitative measure at-a-glance, comments can yield rich insights and further context on what went right or what could be improved.

Once you’ve sent out surveys, it’s time to see if you met the goals that you set out pre-event. Perhaps you aimed to generate 100 new business leads but managed 120 or intended to achieve a 75% attendee engagement rate but only hit 60%. These outcomes provide quantitative measures of success or areas for improvement.

Furthermore, social media can continue to provide valuable feedback post-event. To measure the reach and impact of your event, analyze social media mentions, hashtags, and engagement metrics. Doing this can also help you understand the reach your event had beyond the people that directly attended!

Return on Investment

The term ROI may bring dollar signs to mind, but the truth is it goes much deeper than that!

On the financial side, ROI is straightforward to calculate. The formula is: Revenue generated, minus expenses, equals net profit or loss. Financial ROI gives you a quantitative way to evaluate success, and it’s often the first metric that stakeholders want to know—but make sure you double-check your math and include every expense, even last-minute unforeseen ones! It’s crucial to be thorough when itemizing and tracking expenditures.

Intangible benefits like brand exposure, goodwill, and networking are harder to calculate and may not be realized right away. For example, the value of having industry influencers endorse your product during a launch event has undeniable worth but can’t necessarily be calculated in dollars and cents at the time of your event.

Often these intangibles, while harder to measure, can offer long-lasting benefits that transcend immediate financial gains. How many people now know about your company or product because of the event? Did the event elevate your company’s reputation or foster positive relationships within your industry? These are all questions that should be asked, and the answers may prove your event was a success.

Long-Term Impact

To truly understand your event’s impact, you must look beyond the immediate horizon and well into the future.

While it’s tempting to pack up and call it a day once the event is over—putting on an event is hard work, after all—continuous follow-up and nurturing of leads made during the event can result in ongoing partnerships or sales, adding to the event’s long-term ROI.

Savvy event planners also know that each event serves as a learning opportunity for the next. When all was said and done, did you sell fewer tickets than you thought? Or were sales better than expected, and as a result, the venue was too small? Analyzing all your data and feedback (both positive and negative) is key to learning and improvement. Defining the areas that could be improved will only make your next event more successful!

Summary

Measuring the success of your event isn’t just about tallying up high-fives or likes on social media. It’s all about turning today’s data into tomorrow’s triumphs!

If you’re looking for an easier, less stressful way to measure event success, consider switching your event management platform to Attendease.

With Attendease, you can:

• Gather and measure attendee, event, and event portfolio insights with confidence
• Collect real-time registration data
• Integrate with social media tracking pixels
• Share surveys before, during, or after your event

Attendease helps make measuring event success a breeze. Book a demo today!