Successfully hosting an event is no small feat. It takes a lot of planning and hard work to pull off, so understanding and measuring metrics that will make it a success is vital.
Every successful event is created with a purpose. Whether that’s educating HCPs, building credibility or strengthening relationships, you should have a plan to measure success.
Measurement and metrics play a fundamental role in shaping the future of events.
What does success look like?
Firstly, it’s important to understand what a successful event looks like for you. For most events, there is no one specific metric that will tell you whether or not your event was successful. They are measured in a variety of ways, depending on the objectives of the organisers and attendees. Typically, most events use a mixture of strategies to measure success.
“What gets measured gets managed” Peter Drucker
Typical metrics
In the past, we would usually measure success by the following metrics:
- Attendance counts: Achieving a certain attendance level can be a very good way to measure success
- Crowd polling: Asking attendees to submit surveys in person or online to understand their thoughts.
- Number of media mentions: This will help to gauge the popularity of your event, getting a number of media mentions can give you an idea about how many people are reading about your event, which is a pretty good indicator that people are interested in it. Any articles published in trade publications is definitely a sign of a very successful event.
- Event feedback: Collecting constructive criticism from attendees can be a very useful way to measure the success of an event. Understanding if social aspects were good enough, whether the attendees would make any changes can all help to improve future events.
But that’s not all, as events become more sophisticated, newer ways of measuring success are becoming apparent and the typical metrics are no longer enough.
As sustainability and emotional engagement become more important to people, they became a vital metric to measure against for the events industry.
Sustainability
We’ve talked about the importance of sustainability in an earlier blog, making the world a better place one event at a time and those involved with event planning are fully aware that the size and scale of the events industry results in a huge impact on the planet; from building new venues, flying in delegates to booking entertainment. Being able to have a positive impact on the environment and the people involved helps to justify live events versus purely virtual.
Measurements such as sustainable behaviour, carbon offsetting, responsibly sourced goods and services, providing an accessible event can have a positive impact and make a difference to the world and leave a positive legacy.
Emotional engagement
Emotional engagement helps you measure the depth of users’ feelings towards your event. It’s a way to measure how successfully your content is reaching its audience. It’s indicative of a successful event that engages users emotionally. If your content sparks an emotional response from its attendees then your event will be effective as well. It’s important to measure how successful your events are emotionally, so that you can tailor events accordingly.
By tracking behaviour using technology, you can chart an audience’s emotional journey helping you to understand the way they feel about your content and the way it is delivered to them.
But it doesn’t stop there, imagine being able to use innovative tech to create attendee value metrics that measure the quality of your content and meetings as well as the traditional metrics we’ve mentioned above.
Bringing it together
All of this demonstrates how metrics play a key part in understanding a fast-changing world and allows you to respond rapidly to ever-evolving audience needs.
