How to measure the success of your association's conference

“That was a brilliant conference!”

It’s great to hear those words after your event. All the months of hard work and late nights spent on your association’s conference have been worth it.

But success isn’t only counted in terms of pats on the back and warm words over a chilled/warm glass of wine. If you measure that sentiment, along with other metrics, it can be used to prove the value of your event and – importantly – secure it for many years to come.

Measuring the true success of a conference isn’t something associations often do. Perhaps you send delegates a feedback form a week or so afterwards. But how many of them actually get filled in? Hopefully you’ll keep in touch with your sponsors and exhibitors regularly and gain anecdotal feedback from them, but how successful is your commercial programme, and more importantly, what are you doing to help your commercial clients demonstrate success?

Why should you measure the success of your event?

Conferences are under threat. There are very few industries which can claim to have the “must attend” event in their sector. Like most organisations, associations still need to demonstrate the value of attending their event. How can you demonstrate the value of an event if you don’t measure it’s success? Being able to demonstrate delegate satisfaction will also help with marketing your next event, encouraging people to come along and, importantly, attracting new exhibitors and sponsors.

You invested a lot in the event and being able to prove a positive ROI to the association and its members is important. It’s also useful to be able to understand what went well and what didn’t, and use that insight when planning the next gathering.

What should you measure and how should you do it?

We suggest focusing your measurement efforts on three key areas: delegate outcomes, financial performance and exhibitors and sponsors.

Delegate outcomes

One of the best and least obtrusive ways we’ve found to gather feedback is with a quick person-to-person exit survey. This way you’ll be getting attendees’ immediate reactions, including little things you could easily improve but which they may well have forgotten a couple of weeks later.

Make sure this can take place on the way out, in a relatively open space where it won’t cause an obstruction. Use an iPad/tablet and ask closed questions with a limited number of options for answers. For example, which sessions did you attend? How did you rate the speaker on a scale of 1 to 10? Which stands did you visit?

You could even record people’s responses to the event using a microphone and capturing the audio. This gives people the opportunity to elaborate if they want to, as long as you can guide them with the questions you want them to answer.

A more detailed post-event questionnaire can elicit different responses, even from the same people, and is a great measure of post-event sentiment. For example, someone might leave the event annoyed that the food options for vegans were too limited – something that will probably not cross their mind once they get back to the office.

For post-event feedback, you don’t necessarily have to ask the same people you spoke to with the exit survey. You can ask more open questions about how they feel about different aspects of the conference, when they will have had some time to contemplate and evaluate their experience. They may have had time to delve further into a session or subject that really interested them, and the responses they give will be richer and more useful because of that.

You can use AI to interpret the answers and aggregate the sentiments in both the exit poll and the post-event feedback exercise, giving you rich data to inform how you run the conference next time.

Financial performance

There are several metrics that indicate financial success; profit from ticket sales is just one of them. Setting financial performance goals and measuring them is important, but conferences are an investment in marketing as well as a cost. Organisations should be looking for at least a 10% to 20% ROI margin for running a conference.

Identify points of measurement that can deliver value to you, and against which you can easily set targets in the future. For example, average delegate rate per attendee, average size of a group, or even date booked. Note that mapping your registration booking data across time using a “date booked” indicator can really help map out your trends, which in turn can help you forecast more easily for future iterations of your event.

Using a measurement that accounts for the number of visitors and the total spend enables you to set a baseline for efficiency going forward. Take a leaf from hotels’ books and use RevPAM – Revenue Per Available Metre1 . REVPAM is calculated by dividing total revenue by the total space in square metres. So if your venue was 150 m2 with a revenue of £6000, your RevPAM is £40 per m2. This value can then be used to identify ‘dead’ spaces which could be better utilised to generate income, perhaps with a VIP area or additional refreshments.

Return on investment for exhibitors and sponsors

Being able to prove ROI for sponsors and exhibitors is crucial in persuading them to return next time and in attracting new businesses to your conference. Your business partners know that events like yours are a key marketing activity. You should be able to help them justify their investment with a post-event report including data like the click through rate (CTR) they achieved from their listing on the event website and the cost per click (CPC) if they placed an online ad. And a handy hint, many companies that use events as a marketing strategy struggle to measure success.

The report can also include information on how many delegates walked past their stand, enjoyed their presentation or expressed an interest in their products or services.
Businesses have to prove the value of attending an event in other ways, too. Many businesses will also have carbon budgets to consider and will appreciate any data that helps them report on the environmental impact of sponsoring, attending or exhibiting at an event.

For example, helping visitors understand the different ways they can travel to the event and explaining the most environmentally friendly route will assist travel planning for delegates. The vast bulk (up to 95%2) of the carbon footprint of international events is air travel. You can mitigate this through carbon offsets which you can integrate into the cost of admission, helping reduce the business’s Scope 3 emissions.

Future proofing your event

Effective measurement can go a long way to future proofing your event. Delegate feedback can provide valuable information to adjust your offering for the next event. Financial performance data can show where you should be focusing your spend and how to improve efficiency. And providing visitors, sponsors and exhibitors with concrete data that helps them justify the cost of attending in financial, marketing and environmental terms helps them overcome any objections and barriers they may face in getting their involvement signed off.

¹ RevPAM – Revenue Per Available Meter a development of the RevPAR (Per Available Room) metric used by hotels as a key performance indicator.
² From https://meetgreen.com/event-resources/meetgreen-tips/carbon-offsets-event-planning/#coconference