How can you measure the impact of your large group facilitation services on your clients' business?

I like to select or think about "low bar" measurements for the impact that large group facilitation might have on a conference or event. For example, "will this event help retain one single employee?" Or "will it start at least 100 new connections or relationships?" Or "could we generate at least 3 months worth of content for our social media?" Realistically, a well designed and facilitated event should produce far greater impacts than this, but even a "low bar" metric like this could justify the time and money spent gathering—with an expert facilitator.

Simple. Calculate the average hourly wage of every employee you have in a large group for any event/all staff/etc. Then multiply that number by the number of employees and the number of hours your event takes up. THAT is a big investment to not invite an expert facilitator in to guide the process.

Avoid collecting too much data about whether people "liked it." That is perhaps the most superficial level of measuring the impact of facilitation. Also, pro tip: 5 minutes before the facilitator leads the closing exercise, put up a QR code with the event survey. You'll get a response rate about 50x higher if you play some music for 3 minutes and have everybody share feedback before they even leave the event. And asking questions that are impact focused like "did you make at least one meaningful new connection?" is going to provide far more helpful data than "how'd you like the keynote speaker?"

If a feedback survey is done well, it provides FANTASTIC follow-up content to offset the "curve of forgetting." Treat your surveys like a research project of your audience. What was more important to them? Who do they want to hear from next year? What was a highlight, lowlight, and an insight? All of this provides dozens of neat, creative opportunities for follow-up content to report back valuable information everybody will be interested in.

Alongside reporting and communicating the results, one very important group that tends to get forgotten are the people who provided the feedback in the first place. The best way to ensure you keep getting quality feedback is to reward those who provide it with some form of acknowledgement, appreciation; or if they were very specific (in positive or negative ways) then get back to them personally - they won't forget it.

Besides the quantitative measurement as discussed above, it’s valuable to collect qualitative improvements on the participants via observations as well. These qualitative improvements include the below: 1) confidence level: whether the new learning able to empower the participants to be more independent on the job 2) motivation level: whether there is behaviour improvement occur among the participants 3) engagement level: whether the staffs are more willing to contribute more ideas, energy or commitment to work 4) openess in communication: whether more exchange of thoughts and contribute feedback with each others 5) team collaboration: alignment of focus and objectives with reduced friction among team members is observed

The challenge of measuring the impact of facilitating is isolating and monetizing, How do you know if changes, good or bad, were due to the facilitation? How do you isolate all the contributing factors in order to if and to attribute impact. While it’s fairly straightforward to calculate the cost or investment, it’s very challenging to calculate if and how much was returned due to the facilitation. We must continue to measure in honest and creative ways in order to show value and continue to improve. We also need to acknowledge the difficulty of measuring the impact of facilitation and be honest with our clients and ourselves.