Event Management

Know How To Evaluate Your Event Strategy

Eventually Learning Team
03 October 2022
Read time  7 minutes 10 seconds

"Strategy is a commodity; execution is an art." - Peter Drucker


In contemporary times, event organizers are pursuing a future-ready approach in building their event strategy to mitigate challenges and ensure continued attendee engagement levels. The event planning and execution process is being subjected to metric evaluations – from session-wise analysis to assessing end-to-end data of an event to bring in the highest ROIs.

The event will have a significantly higher ROI with an effective event management strategy. Following the prime facets of an event strategy will refine the overall trajectory of execution.

Why Evaluate Your Event Strategy

It is rightly said that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”; hence, evaluating your event strategy based on the feedbacks from attendees, reflects how well your event was executed. Evaluation through feedbacks takes statistical routes in understanding your event strategy’s know-hows and provides qualitative and quantitative examples to inspire and improve performance. The assessment of events on the basis of responses involves measuring key variables like content uptake, social media mentions and determining the positive and negative outcomes. So, planners follow a scientific approach in evaluating an event strategy that can be utilized for better event building.

So how do you make your event successful?

How do you have a solid strategical plan?

How to know if your goals are at par?

This is when you are done with your event, paid the vendors, sent thank you notes and must be ready for the next big event that comes your way… But, your checklist is incomplete without a post-event evaluation. So, now the question arises - how do you approach a post-event evaluation based on feedbacks and responses?
Know the facets of how to evaluate an event strategy and structure a result driven analysis:

There are different approaches to examining your event strategy. 91% of planners measure success through attendees' satisfaction. 61% are based on the budget, and more than 60% are based on event specifications.
 
No one likes to spin the wheels or leave a task unfinished, so planning serves as the first step in event strategy. Event Data serves as a medium to highlight your event’s effectiveness and will provide insights to improve performance in the future.

Why And How To Evaluate Your Event Strategy

The Whys

Completing the event takes us to the evaluation stage where planners should gather all the data and measure the event’s ROI, determine audience behavior, and have a detailed event summary.

  • Reasons WHY You Should Gather Attendee Feedback:
    • To improve your strategy for upcoming events
    • To build a brand recall that is approachable
    • To build a trust factor amongst your attendees
    • Gives acceleration to your event strategy and event management

  • Welcome Attendee Feedback!
When you seek feedback from the attendees or the valued audience, they feel heard and get involved in expressing their inputs. This will give the planner accurate data, and also the attendee will be engaged in the future events with a positive attitude.

  • Creativity at its Best!
New opinions, factual and honest feedback, and accurate reaction tracking help the organizer see the other side of the coin. This also results in a strategic creative inputs for the organizer to plan the next event. When we end the hitch of communication, we receive free-flowing inputs that accelerate creativity.

  • Find Your Eureka Moment!
Growth is a result of gaining different opinions and working upon improvisations. It’s a eureka moment when we try to dig deeper into a different perspectives and receive growth factors.

The How’s

  • Survey Your Event: A detailed survey will help the planners gain structured responses from the attendees through various platforms of contact
    • Review your event by understanding different frames of reference
    • Ask the right questions to get an accurate and reliable analysis
    • Send individual surveys to attendees, sponsors, speakers, and stakeholders and understand their views about the event
    • Understand attendee in-event and post-event behavior.
    • Analyzing attendees’ social media responses to the event
    • Encourage your attendees to rate the event on different parameters like, speakers, execution, management, presentation, promotion and receive a detailed report to enhance future events

  • Measure & Analyze: Identify the event KPIs and start measuring the event's success based on each parameter and its output.
    • Registrations: The ticket prices and the attractiveness of your events go hand in hand and lead to desired sales. Analyze the total number of registrations and the actual attendees present for the event.
    • Attrition rate: The number of event registrations rarely matches the number of event attendees; hence, derive an attrition rate by dividing the total number of shows by total enrollments and multiplying it by 100. Know where your event stood with a simple calculation.
    • Social media Impressions: Trace audience reactions on social media, look for mentions and engagements; a detailed analytical approach to social media will show how many people actively shared your event posts. More the hype, greater the event succeeded and received a response.
    • Event Engagement: The event’s biggest attraction is the speakers you have lined up. Hence, analyze attendee engagement during the sessions for a structured understanding of your event strategy.
Healthy criticism and a valuable feedback from event attendees help the organizer to build a logic-based event management strategy. The success of your event is entrusted with attendees’ satisfaction. Frame your survey smartly, that you receive detailed responses from your attendees. Get them to rate the event on different parameters like speakers, sponsors, execution, management, etc. Engage with your attendee and ask them if there was any scope for improvement; with the data derived, you will have your event strategy evaluation.

Conclusion

Prepare an end note about your post-event strategy evaluation by comparing your analysis with your past events and creating a report to improve the next event. Do not hesitate to share the problems you face, certain failure points; also include the factors of improvement with recommendations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is evaluation of event strategy important?

Analyzing event strategy helps the organizer attain greater success in the next event. Also, with the success of the event the organizer gets motivated to host the next event, based on incisive analytical attendee evaluations.

What to evaluate after an event?

You can evaluate post-event parameters like attendee referral inclinations, quality of sessions, attendee engagement levels, no-shows, speaker interactions and more such factors.

What is a post-event review?

A post-event review is an analysis of the various event factors that help the brand improve their event performance and derives actionable takeaways from attendee feedback. It all factors in while deciding on phases of event planning.

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