Confex keynote: Measuring the impact of events on business objectives

At Day 1 of International Confex, industry research specialists Explori’s associate research director, Guy Garside, shared a proven model for proving the impact of events on your business objectives.

Using metrics to measure event performance is a long-term challenge for eventprofs and Garside encouraged eventprofs to ask what key things they wanted to measure their events against. He said: “The key theme that came up time and time again was the word ‘impact’. Impact on number of leads, impact on sales and brand awareness. These things are harder to measure for eventprofs.”

To help, Explori has made an Event Impact Playbook and its Event Impact Tree asks eventprofs to set an environmental goal, a sentiment goal, a behavioural goal and a company goal.

“To measure your events you need a lot of data,” Garside added and said key types of event measurement data would include:

  1. Pre-event data e.g. demographics and psychographics
  2. In-event data e.g. what’s happening at the event and
  3. Post-event data e.g. captured typically in a survey, how are attendees feeling after the event?

Overall, the session explored how to create clear impact objectives, how to identify the right measurement data, how to turn data into insight, and how to show the value of your events and improve them for next time.