Measuring your success begins the moment the first person arrives for the event. Are your attendees smiling? Absorbed in the activities? How about your volunteers? Are people thanking the planning committee? Asking if you plan to do it again next year? Planners and organisers should write down all of the comments they hear—positive and negative—to be included in an evaluation of the event.
Objectives
To measure event success, you must set measurable objectives. If you take part in an exhibition to meet new prospects, measure the number of prospects who register their details when visiting your booth.
Pre-Event Survey
This is the time when the meeting or event planner may define some quantifiable measures for ROI and ROO. Survey a broad sample of invitees to identify their issues, concerns and needs on multiple levels. This will help you to define measurement benchmarks for meeting attendees.
Financial
Get your financial reports in order to see if you hit your goal, stayed within budget and minimized unexpected expenses.
In-person interviews/intercepts
In-person interviews can be used to measure the immediate effectiveness of the event and provide insight on things like: what brought consumers to the event, their initial impression/perception of the event and what was most memorable about the event.
Powerful tags
Tags are becoming the best way to categorize whatever activity online. Attendees now understand what a tag is and organize their online communication using them. Powerful tags have a catchy message within it and are not too long.
#Eventname could be not easy to share and not particularly engaging. Try to elaborate on your event name and link it to a powerful message.
Benchmark against competitor events
Find similar events to the one your organising and compare where possible, like-for-like, evaluating each other’s position and make action list where you can improve next time.
Quality of attendees
Getting the right audience to the right event is the key to any event’s success. More so than “quantity,” the quality of the attendees at an event can lead to significant ROI/ROO.
Turnout: Compare the turnout for the event to the number of people who had been invited. If there’s a shortfall, look back at the planning process and try to find out the weak areas.
How do you measure the success of an event?
