Is your corporate event a success? How to measure, compare and benchmark the right event data.

The importance of event measurement

Data and insight has?become increasingly vital to large organisations, especially when budgets for meetings, events and business travel are becoming tighter and the need to prove the impact and ROI of these events ?

During the pandemic, business spent huge amounts of money on virtual platforms (characterised by Hopin’s $7.75bn valuation) and while the growth of the virtual events sector has certainly slowed down it has proven that we can interact effectively virtually. ?

The common consensus among events professionals (from what I've seen at least) is that live events are better and more effective than virtual events. However, with the energy crisis in Europe, global inflation and the rising cost of living,?the costs associated with running and attending in-person meetings & events have?undoubtably increased.

Combined with the knowledge that we can interact virtually and with virtual likely costing less (or at least investment has already been committed during the pandemic) businesses are hesitant to return to live events. ?

Therefore, the requirement to quantify and prove the impact and value of in-person meetings & events has arguably never been more important. ??

Where to?start?

When it comes to measuring event impact, you need to start with setting the right objectives. From there you can begin to identify which data is useful and over time, use the resulting insight to predict the health of your events. When you have your data consistently collected across an event programme, you can then begin to strategically benchmark performance to understand whether you’re on the path to growth and future success. And if you’re not, identify what needs to change.? ?

Benchmarking is a fundamental part of the measurement process and is a term we’ve probably all heard of but what does mean for events???

What is Benchmarking and why is it important?

Benchmarking, simply put, is the process of measuring something against an agreed standard. It gives you context to your own performance. Without context, it’s difficult to truly define success.?

Benchmarks provide the necessary insights to help you understand how you compare with others in your industry and can help organizations identify areas for improvements.?

For example, imagine you’re running a 100m race, but you have no idea how fast your competitors are, what level you’re entering at or what the average time is.??

You know that your best time is 15 seconds. But is that good? Or bad? Or indifferent??

If you’re racing an Olympic level 100m race, and the benchmark is 11 seconds, you know that you are way below the standard and have huge improvements to make to your performance.??

However, if you’re racing your colleagues in the office, and the benchmark is 20 seconds, then you are way above the standard and are outperforming your competitors.??

Without knowing what race you’re in and what the benchmark is would be like racing with a blindfold. No context or understanding of how good or bad you are and crucially, no idea on what steps you need to take and how much training you need put in to improve.??

Benchmarks give you the context needed to understand how good you are and how you can get better.????

How do benchmarks fit into event measurement?

Many corporate event teams measure the success of their meetings & events based on lagging metrics such as how much profit it generated, the number of attendees, or a straightforward attendee experience metric like Net Promoter Score? (NPS).??

However, this approach is no longer fit for purpose and falls short when it comes to predicting the health of your event and brand.??

These simple metrics in isolation only paint part of the bigger picture an organization needs to understand how well their event program is really performing. To understand whether you're on the path to growth and future success you need to view event performance in context.?

From a strategic perspective, when your data is siloed, it relegates you to making critical decisions about the future of your event programmes based on a narrow view of how they perform.??

But meetings & events don’t usually happen in a vacuum. There are previous iterations of the same internal event, other events within the organization’s portfolio, and in the case of a customer-facing event, other events within the wider market to compare it to.???

Benchmarks allow you to go beyond the narrow ROI of a given event to determine how well it’s performing comparatively, and to establish trends that indicate where your event is going. ??

From a holistic view, benchmarks allow the top of the business to understand the true health and impact of their event programmes. Not only do benchmarks help drive strategic decision-making by identifying underperforming areas of an event programme, but they also allow you to demonstrate and quantify the impact that your it has throughout your organization.??

?How do we measure event impact?

"You can’t manage what don’t measure" ?

We’ve gone through why benchmarks are so critical, however, before we benchmark event impact, we must first measure it. Without measuring your event impact how can you possibly begin to manage, control or benchmark that impact???

So, how do you practically measure event impact? ?

Before you look at your event programme’s performance vs the wider context, you need to know what success looks like for you, for your team and for your organisation. This begins with establishing clear and measurable objectives.

For example, if you have an employee training event for your sales team, the temptation might be to set the objective to increase the team's productivity, or generate more revenue next quarter. However, for most B2B businesses, sales cycles can be lengthy with many different touchpoints in between. The most meaningful objectives are ones that can be measured a few days after the event, ones that demonstrate the true value of this channel. 3 objectives that you could set instead are ones that focus on:?

1. Behaviour - % of employees that intend to apply the new sales method??
2. Attitude - % of employees that feel your company leads the market in your sector?
3. Understanding - % of employees that have a sound understanding of the benefits of your new product?

Internal meetings & events can sometimes be hard to measure with traditional KPIs, especially when focusing on long term outcomes, such as team productivity. In order to prove and quantify the impact, it's crucial to set measurable objectives that are directly linked to the event experience.?

You can apply this framework to all types of events, whether that be market facing events, 3rd party exhibits or internal meetings and training events.??

What type of data helps you demonstrate the impact of your events??

Now we know why benchmarks are important and how to set the right objectives, we need to identify what data we need to plug in. Answering the question of “what data is useful?” is no easy task, especially in today’s digital world where we have more data than we know what to do with.??

So, what data do we need to demonstrate the impact of our events???

Well, we can break this down into 3 simple categories:?

1. Demographic?
2. Engagement?
3. Sentiment?

Demographic data refers to who people are. It’s their job title, company name, location, seniority etc and is collected and organised pre-event. For internal meetings & events, you’ll likely hold this information in your CRM or employee databases.??

Engagement data tells us what people did at an event. Where they went, who they visited, and how they engaged. This is mostly applicable to virtual events as the virtual platforms can track attendee movements much easier than at live events.?

Sentiment data tells us why people did what they did. This data is collected via a post-event survey.??It’s the final piece of the puzzle and is by far the most important piece of data. Sentiment data is the missing link in the measurement process because it compliments and enhances all the other data you collect.??

Sentiment data is the single point of truth, collected at a point where your audience is most engaged. It provides macro-level sentiment towards the event which is something that cannot be gained through analysis of demographic and engagement data alone and so holds the key to understanding the true impact of your event.?It not only gives us our attendee experience metrics such as NPS, CSAT, Loyalty and Value for Time, but it also allows us to quantify Behavioural and Attitudinal impact.??

Behavioural and Attitudinal Impact scores are metrics that measure the extent to which you shifted attendee behaviour and influence attitude towards your event objectives. They are measures of how impactful an event was and like the other attendee experience metrics, they can be benchmarked. They are directly linked to your Behavioural and Attitudinal objectives I mentioned earlier.??

By effectively linking up all 3 data sets, the outcome is a total view of the overall event experience. It helps you move beyond a surface level and tactical view into the realm of evidence-based strategic insight.

How do you harness this data and what insight does it produce??

So far, we’ve established 3 things:?

1. Why benchmarks are important (they give us context)?
2. How we can measure event impact (set the right objectives)?
3. What data we need (Demographic, Engagement and Sentiment)?

Now how do we leverage this data and crucially, what kind of actionable insight can it provide???

One of the best ways to harness the data you’ve collected and put it use, is by using a framework called the Feedback Loop. This is broken down into 5 steps:

Step 1: Measure?

• The first thing you do is measure. This is where you set your impact objectives and then collect your 3 data types using the most appropriate technology for you.??

Step 2: Analyse ?

• Once you have all your data, you can run your analysis and?translate your data into insight.?When you collect your data in a structured way, based on your impact objectives, your analysis will start to deliver actionable insights.??
• At this stage, benchmarking comes in. Because you’ve collected data in a consistent way, you can compare and benchmark your results to get a deeper understanding of the impact of each event across the entire event programme.??

Step 3: Share?

• This step is crucial to?helping you move forward as a business. Sharing your results, regardless of their performance, gives transparency and helps support the continued improvement of each event. If an organization doesn't know what’s wrong, it can’t be fixed.??

Step 4: Decide?

• Using the results of the analysis, you can determine which changes, enhancements and new strategies you need to deliver in the next cycle and the resources required. This can be done on an individual event level but more commonly at the top of the business.??

Step 5: Act?

• The final stage is to deliver the changes that you deem necessary. And shout about them. Make your audience aware that their feedback is the reason that certain changes are being made. It 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.??

One of the key things to keep in mind with the feedback loop is to complete every step. Many of us will run step 1, maybe a bit of step 2, but we don’t share this insight internally, nor do we use it to inform strategic decision making to create better experiences for our audience. Whether this be because of poor data collection or a belief that feedback doesn’t provide us anything we can act on, or any number of other things. Regardless, you must move away from this and take each step in the feedback loop seriously. When you do this, you create a perpetual and virtuous circle that is always helping you improve.

Takeaways

The 3 things that I hope you take away from this are: ?

1. Firstly, that to measure the true value of events, you must create impact objectives based on what you want attendees to think, feel and do as a result of the event.?
2. Secondly, that you only need 3 pieces of data - demographic, engagement and sentiment data. The combination of these creates?the complete view of the impact of your events.?
3. Finally, data alone will not improve your event strategy. You must translate that data into insight and then?use it to direct your strategy. When you apply the actionable recommendations based on insight, your events will become even more impactful.?

Event measurement, especially at scale, can seem like a daunting task. However, by approaching it in a structured way, from the top, and applying the same measurement process to each event within a global programme you can provide the necessary insight that you need to demonstrate the value of a global events function. As event professionals, we know how important meetings and events are, especially in-person ones. But in today's digital and data-driven world, knowing something isn’t always enough. Proof, in the form of quantifiable impact metrics and KPI’s is what will be needed going forward. ?

If you want to know more about how you can measure your event programme, then you can download Explori’s Event Impact Playbook and Benchmarking Guide created specifically for corporate event professionals. ?

If you have any questions or thoughts, then I’d love to hear from you so feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or via email: [email protected]?