Don't Let A Beautiful Event Go To Waste! (Part Three)
Today’s post is our last in this three-part series about helping you get the most out of your event planning work by setting meaningful and measurable goals. For steps to take in the pre-event stage, see Post #1 in our series; for steps to take during an event, see Post #2 in our series.
At Kennedy Events, we’re experts in both the production of your event and the strategic side of understanding how that event needs to fit your business needs so that at every step in the process you’re able to successfully measure the results of your efforts. Our goal is to help you grow your event year over year. Following these steps will set you on a strong path towards that end.
Once the last guest has departed and décor is taken down, we know it can be tempting to just want to celebrate and move on, but there’s actually still a lot of work to do after the event.
POST EVENT
Monitoring the measurement of your goals and reporting the results is the most important part. We know you might feel as if you’ve already “checked that event completion box,” but after an event is where the rubber meets the road. This is when you determine not just the ROI of the event, but also make use of the content you generated, explore potential opportunities for future events, and make future investments.
PUT YOUR CONTENT ASSETS TO USE
Remember those client interviews? Here are several ways to make them worth their weight in gold:
Upload video testimonials to your website
Grab sound bites, titles, and headshots of key clients as static testimonials for your website
Share the sound bites with your C-suite and board
Invite enthusiastic interviewees to join prospect discussions and help with your sales
Invite your MVP interviewees who had real insights into your product to form an advisory board that your C-level team will truly listen to for product development
Train your customer success team to recognize what your clients love most and need most about your service
HOW WILL THIS EVENT IMPACT THE NEXT ONE?
Our goal is to help you have growth in your events—in terms of your measurable goals—year after year. So, soon after your event, take some time to talk with your key stakeholders and event attendees about what you should do next year to raise your goals and continue meeting them.
Each event builds on the previous one, so we will host a debrief meeting with your team and ours after the event to review and document what worked well and what can improve to continue meeting your goals. We’ll work with you to make good use of all the feedback we worked so hard to get during the event. We then package all of that up into a debrief document that becomes a critical reminder and roadmap for future events. When the next event or next year comes around, this is the first thing we will read to outline a plan for success.
PACKAGE YOUR EVENT PLAN INTO A POST-EVENT REPORT
Take the results of your polls or surveys, testimonials, anecdotal feedback from your colleagues, praise you receive in emails from attendees, and your debrief notes; package them into a succinct slide deck that tells your event’s story and allows the results to sing. Be sure to remind your audience—your boss, her boss, your board, or your investors—of the goals you set at the beginning and how you achieved or exceeded them.
MEASURING RESULTS IS A LONG GAME
Let’s be super clear here: seeing results from an event is a long game. Your event (probably!) isn’t a Beyoncé album launch with 1B in sales overnight. It might take you 18 months to see the full cycle of results from your event and that’s okay. The trick here is finding a way to accurately measure those results so that you can show your sky-high ROI to your key stakeholders. (In the earlier report, be sure to remind and prepare those stakeholders that results will continue to be felt over time.)
WILL YOUR EVENT STAY IN THE BUDGET NEXT YEAR?
(HINT: IF YOU CREATED AND MET YOUR SMART GOALS, IT WILL.)
An event can be the first thing to go on a budget if you don’t have the ROI clearly defined and measured long after the event. However, it can also be one of the first things to get an increased budget if you’re able to clearly prove your ROI.
“The Kennedy Events team asks perceptive questions, draws up smart plans, has a knack for anticipating problems, and keeps track of a million tiny details, never letting anything drop.”
To make sure you’re getting as much ROI as possible on your next event, let’s chat strategy (and of course, we’ll chat about the fun parts too).
Paige Buck
Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events is a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allow our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.
About Kennedy Events
Kennedy Events began in 2000 with one goal in mind—to produce corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Since then, Paige, Maggie, and their team have built one of the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
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