Meetings and events SHOULD be seen as indispensable business channels – so why aren’t they?

Meetings and events leaders are constantly fighting for their position within their organizations, despite being a critical revenue generating business channel. Not only do they contribute significantly to the bottom line, but NPS, customer satisfaction, employee retention and brand recognition are all positively amplified by the work done in the events department. And yet, when it comes to budget cuts, evidencing value or demonstrating impact, it always seems like the events and meetings department gets the brunt of it.

Why is that?

For me, it’s simple. We’re just not very good at measuring, communicating and acting on how important we really are.

We live in a world where marketing channels are constantly under review and business units are being streamlined on a weekly basis. As we continue to navigate a turbulent organizational landscape, event leaders must be able to prove their worth and justify business investment. To do that, we need to present the numbers that matter to the people that need them.

Otherwise, it’s no surprise that the powers that be don’t always see true value in events as a business channel. We’re not speaking their language with real, tangible metrics. We need to learn how to, and quickly.

So, in my quest to make meetings and events departments as indispensable as they should be, here are my three suggestions of how to make sure your organization sees the value in events as a business channel:

1.????Measure the performance of your event program

…Sounds obvious, right? However, the number of event departments globally that don’t actually measure their event performance with tangible data is surprisingly high.

Let’s dig into this a bit more. First of all – what do I mean by measurement?

As event and meetings leaders, you know what it feels like to be onsite at that internal training day, customer product launch or AGM. That buzz. The palpable excitement in the air. But the difficulty is taking those anecdotal thoughts and feelings and translating them into something tangible that the wider business understands. Nowadays, we need so much more than revenue generated or attendee numbers to measure success, as these often only paint a tiny portion of the bigger picture.

Instead, we need to use customer feedback and experience to measure event performance. Real measurement that understands attendee perception and expectation. Tangible measurement that enables you to understand your audiences and make strategic, data-driven decisions accordingly. Proactive measurement that allows you to intelligently consolidate events programs, to redistribute budgets, or to invest in those portfolios that really need the lift… long before attendee numbers start dropping or revenue begins to fall.

The best way to measure your event performance is to bring in a tool that collects and interprets the customer experience data for you (personally I would always recommend an excellent survey tool, cough cough), so you can see in real time how your events are performing year-on-year. All too often we’re mistaking anecdotes for data, whether an effusive email from a happy speaker or the angry words of a disgruntled sponsor. Yet the plural of anecdote is not data, and it’s *data* that gives voice to the silent majority and reveals hidden trends. It’s data that allows us to be strategic. As a result, customer experience data has to be used to measure the performance of your event program.

After all, if you don’t measure your event performance, how can you really expect the rest of the business to not only understand - but value - the impact of your department?

2.?????Communicate your findings to the wider business

Once you’ve measured your event performance (whether an individual event, portfolio or entire program), you now need to actually communicate the results to relevant stakeholders around the business. You could have built the best measurement process in the world, but if these are poorly played back to the appropriate groups, then the effort risks being largely wasted.

It’s critical to understand before you even start collecting your event measurement data, not only what success looks like for a given?event or portfolio of events, or what data points are central to measuring performance against this success criteria... but how should the findings be communicated back to the different stakeholders involved with the event most effectively, and what do you want them to do about it??

When communicating your key learnings, you must establish immediately who your stakeholders actually are. You’ll almost certainly have individuals with different levels of seniority, business focuses, insight needs and learning styles. Therefore, it’s up to you to map out how they’re used to being communicated to, how they'll best consume the measurement data, and what you want them to do with it.

For example, It’s likely that the C-Suite level stakeholders are not going to want to be presented with a 10,000-row spreadsheet with raw data, so you should probably opt for sharing with them three key takeaways. Whilst those in an operational role, who are perhaps more likely to have a remit to implement day-to-day changes on the back of the measurement data, will find a summary of the top three takeaways insufficient.?

Critically, both groups will be reassured that the other type of output exists – the C-Suite, that there is a detailed data analysis underpinning the key messages, and for the operational stakeholders, the takeaways provide an initial steer into the data that they can follow-up on with the more granular outputs.?

Make sure a comprehensive communication journey is built into your measurement strategy, so that the wider business can get one step closer to understanding and valuing events as a channel.

3.????Act strategically on your measurement findings

So you’ve measured your event performance, you’ve shared it with the right people… now what?

In order for your measured results to improve year-on-year (and thus your value and impact as a business channel), you need to act on the findings from your attendee thoughts, brand perception, employee feedback and customer satisfaction.

Put simply - It’s time to actually DO something with what you learnt.

Where does that begin?

The moment you’ve communicated event performance to your stakeholders, make sure you decide and document any next step actions. Whose responsibility is it to deliver on the measurement data findings? Which department needs to action the relevant changes? What are timelines and key milestones? Determine which changes, enhancements and strategies you’ll execute in the next cycle, and the resources required.

Thus begins your implementation and delivery of changes that you deem necessary. However, it’s not just internal stakeholders that need to know how you’re acting upon your measurement data. Make your audience aware that their freedback is the reason that certain changes are being made. This instils confidence in the feedback process and will have a positive effect on the amount of feedback you receive in future which, in turn, gives you a much richer data set to work with. It’s all a continuous cycle – acting strategically on your measurement findings will only increase your business indispensability in the years to come.

Just as it’s almost pointless to measure data if you’re not going to share it with the business, it’s also much less impactful if you don’t then take those measurement findings and act upon them. Loudly.

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Meetings and events leaders are constantly fighting for their position in their organizations, despite being a critical revenue generating business channel. Not only do they contribute significantly to the bottom line, but NPS, customer satisfaction, employee retention and brand recognition are all positively amplified by the work done in the events department. By you and your teams. And yet, when it comes to budget cuts, evidencing value or demonstrating impact, we always seem to take a beating.

As we step into 2023, we can no longer use anecdotes as a way to evidence our business impact. With channels constantly under review, and marketing campaigns having all the data, businesses are going to be looking hard at robust numbers to justify spend.

So… we need to prove our value as a critical business channel through the right measurement.

Let’s make sure we are indispensable.

Time to measure, communicate and act.