How Do You Measure Event Success?
PRIMARILY, this article relates to a corporate event. Perhaps an annual Sales Conference, Divisional Meeting or Channel Partner event. Attendees don’t pay to attend as the host organisation picks up the bill. Attendance might well be mandatory. The event runs 2-4 days, interstaters are flown in and everyone is accommodated, fed, watered and entertained. The days are full of various plenary and breakout sessions, including the odd guest speaker or two. The evenings are designed for fun, socialising and networking with work colleagues, peers and senior management from the host organisation.
When the event is over, attendees expect to receive an evaluation form of some kind seeking their feedback. In fact, the best time to obtain feedback is when they’re still at the event. However, many still send it afterwards and then wonder why the response rate is so poor. But that doesn’t overly concern the host organisation or the event planner since everyone left smiling, verbally offering their thanks and high praise. Here are the big problems with this and how the success of an event gets judged….
Smiling faces and verbal appreciation often tends to be the gauge of success. In addition, the execution of an event is judged against success – if there were no mishaps or disaster then the event must have been successful, right? Wrong. The only thing that should matter is outcomes. Action taken afterwards by attendees and how they apply information and knowledge provided to them during an event to their personal or work lives should be the key determination of success. Nothing else really matters. You can write down all the notes you like during an event but if you do nothing with them afterwards and take no new action when you get back to your desk, the event’s been a total waste of time and money.
The error and misjudgement of equating event success with smiling faces and smooth execution is often reinforced and amplified by the feedback from poorly designed evaluation forms seeking satisfaction ratings from hospitality components – eg. the venue, the accommodation, the food, the team building, the gala dinner, the entertainment, etc. There will be a natural bias in people’s assessment of these elements particularly if the attendee didn’t pay to attend and even more so if the event was organised by an internal employee. Feedback is further tainted if it cannot be given anonymously. Success becomes coloured, polluted and delusional. Reality is warped.
Really want to know if your event has been a success? Two weeks to three months afterwards, ask participants if they’re doing anything new as a result of attending. If their answer is “no”, your event was a fail.
Outcomes are the only things that really matter.