Defining and Measuring a Successful Event

With so many moving parts involved in event planning and management, how can you make sure you’re measuring and proving the success of your event? It may be a lot simpler than you think, and it begins with defining what success means to you and your company.

Determine Strategy and Set Goals
We’ve been in the events and sponsorships management business for almost 20 years, and what we know about success is that it must be based on a company’s objectives and measured using the company’s business metrics.

For a public-facing event, your goals might be:

• growing brand awareness
• increasing attendance or registrations
• engagement with your audience
• distribution of products and information about your company
• gathering survey results
• social posts or online impressions

For an internal company event, the goals shift. Examples might include:

• recognizing and thanking employees, donors or volunteers
• distributing critical information
• celebrating a company event, award or occasion

If your event strategy is defined and documented, you’ll be better able to call it a success when you show results that clearly demonstrate support of the overall event strategy.

Measure Client, Attendee and Partner Feedback
When we measure the success of an event, we consider several data points, including:

• anecdotal and formal comments from guests or attendees
• feedback and suggestions from the Evenergy team connected to the event
• input from key vendors we may have partnered with
• client feedback, both from direct contacts and their senior management

Depending on the event, there are ways to capture formal feedback through an on-site survey or scorecard. Anecdotal feedback is important, too, yet it can be the hardest to remember to capture. Social media feedback is valuable as well and allows us to report metrics surrounding event posts while we’re at it.

It’s our internal event debrief meetings that allow us to take a step back post-event and walk through all the feedback we collected. These meetings are invaluable to us for annual events — reviewing feedback, notes, successes and opportunities — and also for any of our events moving forward.

Are you making the most of the feedback you receive? Take time to document all feedback, and you’ll be able to build a powerful story of your event’s success.

Review Adherence to Budget and Any Variables
Events of any scale require significant work and can be expensive, but they’re a great way to showcase your brand and business. We’ve partnered with clients on events where the budget is several thousand dollars, and we’ve managed events that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Managing event costs and monitoring adherence to budget is part of what we do as an event and sponsorship firm. We know how important it is to clients that we adhere to their budget and work to manage costs throughout the life of an event while constantly keeping in mind event objectives.

This is where our experience shines. We are able to capitalize on our connections, take advantage of our experience in the industry and look at every aspect of an event to give the client a comprehensive budget alongside the strategic plan.

Keeping event costs in line and on budget can make or break the perceived success of your event.

Know your event’s ROI
Measuring an event’s success, whether it is an outdoor festival, corporate luncheon or month-long food truck tour, allows you to identify what you need to work on when planning future events. You need concrete criteria to calculate an event’s ROI. And you have to understand what criteria to use.

Are you someone who understands how to effectively evaluate the success of an event? Then give yourself a high five, because it’s a worthy skill to have — and one that we foster with our Evenergy team members and clients.

Interested in learning about some of our successful events and sponsorships? Learn more about our work.