Measurement
Most event reports measure what was easy to count.
Impressions, footfall and a satisfaction score taken in the afterglow of the gala. None of them tell you whether the event did the thing it was funded to do — and the questions that would are usually not asked until it is too late to collect the data.
Decide this first
The measurement plan belongs at the brief.
What you need afterwards decides what registration has to collect, what the door has to scan, how sessions are tracked and what the lead capture is mapped to. Agreed before registration opens, it is a data-collection exercise. Agreed afterwards, it is an archaeology exercise.
- 01Every event
Attendance against model
Registered, attended, no-show rate — against the number you planned for, not against last year’s.
- 02Conferences
Session engagement
Which sessions filled, which emptied, and where people left. This is the clearest signal about next year’s agenda.
- 03Exhibitions
Meetings held vs targeted
The number that decides whether an exhibition paid for itself. Footfall past the stand is not a metric.
- 04Customer events
Qualified leads and pipeline
Leads that reached the CRM, how fast, and what happened to them at 30, 90 and 180 days.
- 05Commercial events
Cost per meaningful conversation
Total programme cost divided by the conversations that actually mattered. Uncomfortable, and the most useful single figure available.
- 06Every event
Budget variance by line
Actual against approved, by line, with variances explained rather than netted off.
- 07Internal events
Delegate sentiment
A short survey answered by enough people to mean something, rather than a long one answered by fifteen.
- 08Every event
Incidents
What went wrong, how it was resolved and what it cost. In the report by design.
What to ignore
Four numbers that look like evidence.
Social media impressions
Almost never correlates with anything the event was for.
Total footfall
Counts people walking past. Says nothing about who you spoke to.
Satisfaction scores above 4.5
Everybody scores well immediately after a good dinner. Ask again in three weeks.
App downloads
A proxy for a proxy. Session attendance is the real number underneath it.
The close-out report
Written to be forwarded.
The report you receive is the one you send to your leadership without editing it. It carries attendance, engagement, the commercial position and the incident log — the last one on purpose, because a report with nothing wrong in it reads as marketing and everybody senior knows it.
Close-out report
What it contains
- 1Attendance and no-show against the planned model
- 2Engagement by session, meeting or exhibitor as the format requires
- 3Budget versus actual by line, with variances explained
- 4Incidents, resolutions and any cost impact
- 5Two or three things worth changing next time
- 6Full data export in the format agreed at the brief
You own the data. The export format is agreed before registration opens, not negotiated afterwards.
Need to justify last year’s event? Start by fixing this year’s brief.
Tell us what number you will be asked about afterwards, and we will build the collection into registration, the door and the lead capture from the start.
hello@voyacircle.com