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Meeting visitors attending this year’s Office show has been a rewarding and informative experience for KDM Event Management. PAs, EAs and administrative executives find the show a useful source of contacts and tools that will enhance their working lives, and the show provided us with a chance to engage with visitors in a seminar environment, where we discussed how we can assist our customers in measuring the positive impact of the events they organise.
Our opening message was that with a little advance planning, conferences, team building days and other corporate communication activities can be measured and evaluated with the same rigour that is applied to other business initiatives.
It has long been known that there’s a huge need to find a way to effectively measure the success of business events. And from our perspective, the starting point is to be clear on what really constitutes Event Success. Our own research has revealed that in many cases people at the sharp end of event management have only a general idea of their events’ objectives. Or, during the hectic planning process, organisers lose sight of the event’s original purpose – because their focus is directed on the logistical arrangements and delegate communications.
While speaker quality, venue arrangements, and even financial management are critical elements of any conference or event planner’s checklist, they don’t provide the reason or impetus to hold an event. So we encouraged our seminar attendees to identify the leadership team strategy that would have prompted the decision to stage their events in the first place – and to focus on that event’s purpose throughout the planning stage to ensure that its agenda and content would deliver the most effective communication.
Then we introduced the discipline of applying metrics to the planning process. Having identified the objective of, say, reducing employee turnover, the second key step is to attribute numerical targets to that objective. A prime parallel exists in the emotive area of dieting. Nothing much is achieved all the time we are merely saying we’d like to be able to get back into our skinny jeans. But as soon as we step on the scales, make a note of our starting figure and then set the target of losing so many kilos in so many weeks, we have a plan that enables us to track progress and provide measurable outcomes.
Similarly, in the business world, it’s not possible to say how successful an event was in achieving its objectives without having the same kind of metrics in place. This, we believe, is where so many event managers trip up. Very often it’s after the event that people say – “We need to demonstrate ROI” – but without the benchmark figures against which a post-event comparison can be made, it’s too late to conduct any meaningful measurement.
Using tablets with a customised app, our delegates told us how confident they were in measuring the success of the events they organise. We put this question to them at the start of the seminar and then again at the end. From an unpromising start, we were delighted to see how enthusiastically they had absorbed the seminar content and how confident they were to put their newly-acquired knowledge into practice.
Delegates confirmed to us that measurement had never entered their event evaluation process. Naturally, it’s the ‘owner’ of the event – the director or senior leadership team that conceived it in the first place – who would be responsible for evaluating its business performance. But we know that the concept of ‘before-and-after’ numerical comparison is still largely untried amongst corporate event organisers. The PAs and EAs who attended our seminar will be in the vanguard of championing and executing this discipline.
For KDM it was really gratifying to welcome such an interested and engaged audience (especially as our seminar session had strong competition from the other theatres!). It was clear that PAs are not only keen to be proactive and make an assertive contribution in their jobs but also delighted to support their bosses in demonstrating ROO – the return on objectives for their events.
To be able to demonstrate to the CEO or the Board that the event provided a real return on its objectives, will link the event organiser directly to the overall performance improvement of the business, earning considerable kudos – for the PA and of course their boss – in the process.
