KEYS TO A WINNING POST-EVENT ANALYSIS
Tips on bolstering your event performance recap
Storytelling is an important part of every successful event. But the post-event story you tell your executives is just as critical.
A clear and compelling post-event analysis lets decision-makers know you know exactly how your event expenditures contributed to the company’s overall business goals, and why future investments in events make good financial sense.
“A strong measurement analysis starts with understanding what the event was designed to achieve and evaluating performance against those objectives,” says Gina DeVito, director, global experiences & partnerships at Indeed.
Where to start? The strongest post-event recaps answer three questions, DeVito says: Did we reach the right audience? Did we create meaningful engagement? And did that engagement contribute to the outcomes the event was intended to influence?
“Engagement metrics help us understand participation and experience, audience quality validates that we reached the right people and business outcomes demonstrate whether the event advanced meaningful organizational goals,” she says. “The specific measures of success in each category should reflect the role the event plays within the broader business strategy.”
Post-show analyses should also communicate how the event performed against leadership priorities. Marques E. Zak, chief marketing & brand officer at the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), says his event team leverages historical survey data from comparable events to create a benchmark and then builds a composite score from their own events over time. Both points of reference are used to tell them how they are performing against the broader organization and how they are performing against themselves. The approach transformed post-event reporting from a collection of metrics into a more powerful business performance assessment, he says.
“We could clearly articulate whether an event over-delivered, met expectations or underperformed against the outcomes leadership cared about most. More importantly, it allowed us to make stronger decisions about future investment because we were comparing apples to apples rather than relying on anecdotal feedback or isolated data points,” Zak says.
And while an event is one moment in time, it’s critical that a post-event analysis communicate both the short- and long-term impact of the event. DeVito calls it the value of balancing leading and lagging indicators. “Immediate measures such as attendance, engagement, meetings and sentiment provide an early view of performance, while business impact often materializes weeks or months later,” she says. “A measurement framework that accounts for both allows organizations to demonstrate value in the short term while maintaining visibility into long-term outcomes.”
Indeed, a winning post-event analysis is never communicated with just a few data points. They are a thoughtful mashup of past and present benchmarks, insights from diverse data sources and short- and long-term perspectives. “The most effective impact reports tell a clear story that connects goals, activities and outcomes rather than presenting a collection of disconnected metrics,” DeVito says.
Image credit: Nadzeya_Dzivakova/iStock
